The English Spy (gabriel Allon, #15)

Daniel Silva's The English Spy follows Israeli intelligence operative and art restorer Gabriel Allon as he hunts a terrorist-for-hire whose trail leads from the Caribbean to the heart of a Russian-orchestrated conspiracy. The story continues threads from previous novels, particularly the defection of Russian sleeper agent Madeline Hart and Gabriel's impending appointment as chief of Israel's secret intelligence service, known as "the Office."

On the Caribbean island of Saint Barthélemy, a man operating under the alias Colin Hernandez infiltrates the crew of the luxury yacht Aurora as its replacement chef. The yacht's famous passenger, an unnamed former princess of England, boards the next morning with a small entourage. Hidden in Hernandez's duffel bag are a silenced pistol and a bomb. That night, after killing his sous-chef and the captain, he adjusts the ship's heading, escapes in a Zodiac dinghy, and detonates the device, sinking the Aurora with all aboard.

The explosion triggers a global crisis. Graham Seymour, chief of MI6 (Britain's foreign intelligence service), privately concludes the attack was deliberate but cannot identify the bomber. Uzi Navot, head of the Office, flies to London with intelligence identifying the bomber as Eamon Quinn, a former bomb maker for the Real IRA, a dissident Irish republican paramilitary group. Quinn masterminded the 1998 Omagh car bombing in Northern Ireland, which killed 29 people, and afterward became a terrorist-for-hire, building weapons for Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and al-Qaeda. Navot points Seymour toward Gabriel.

Seymour travels to Rome, where Gabriel is seeing off his heavily pregnant wife Chiara. He presents a file on Quinn and reveals that during the summer of 1998, as head of counterterrorism at MI5 (Britain's domestic security service), he had an agent inside the Real IRA who warned of the Omagh plot. The operation failed when Quinn deliberately parked the bomb car in the wrong location to maximize casualties. Seymour asks Gabriel to find and kill Quinn and determine who commissioned the princess's murder. He also introduces his intended partner: Christopher Keller, a former officer in Britain's Special Air Service (SAS) who is officially dead.

Keller's history is tangled with Quinn's. In the late 1980s, Keller operated undercover in West Belfast for MI5. He fell in love with Elizabeth Conlin, daughter of a commander in the Irish Republican Army (IRA). When the IRA discovered the relationship, Quinn kidnapped Keller and brought him to a farmhouse in South Armagh for execution. Keller killed four captors and escaped, but Quinn murdered Elizabeth. After a friendly-fire incident in Iraq killed his SAS unit in 1991, Keller deserted and settled in Corsica under the protection of Don Anton Orsati, a crime lord. Seymour offers a deal: Help find Quinn in exchange for a new identity and a job at MI6. Keller agrees.

Gabriel and Keller travel to Dublin to abduct Liam Walsh, a Real IRA drug dealer who was in the Omagh bomb car with Quinn. After killing Walsh's bodyguards, they transport him to a cottage in County Galway for interrogation. Walsh reveals that Quinn fled to Spain after Omagh, then to Libya, then to Venezuela, where a surgeon gave him a new face. Quinn has a secret wife, Maggie Donahue, and a daughter, Catherine, in Belfast. Gabriel sketches Quinn's altered face, and Keller executes Walsh.

In Belfast, Gabriel breaks into the Donahue home and discovers a torn ticket for Lisbon's streetcar system. The team locates Quinn's apartment in Lisbon's Bairro Alto district. After more than a week of surveillance, a dark-haired woman enters Quinn's building, spends the night, and flies to London the next morning. Gabriel and Keller follow. At Heathrow, the woman collects a stolen BMW and drives toward central London. Before police can intervene, she parks on Brompton Road across from Harrods and arms the bomb. Gabriel receives a text from Quinn: "The bricks are in the wall," the same coded phrase from Omagh. He and Keller frantically evacuate pedestrians. Gabriel sprints toward a car containing a mother and her young son, but the five-hundred-pound bomb explodes, killing 52 people including them. Gabriel survives the blast.

While recovering at an MI6 safe house, Gabriel presents his theory: The entire operation was orchestrated by Russia's SVR (foreign intelligence service) as retaliation for Gabriel's previous actions against Russia, including the defection of Madeline Hart, who had been Prime Minister Jonathan Lancaster's secret lover. Gabriel proposes faking his own death. He visits Madeline, now under MI6 protection in Cornwall, who identifies the Brompton Road bomber as Katerina, a girl she knew at a training camp run by the KGB (the former Soviet intelligence service) for illegals, deep-cover spies raised to assume false identities in the West. Katerina is an SVR-trained assassin.

Gabriel arranges his public "death" through journalist Samantha Cooke of the Telegraph. At SVR headquarters in Moscow, Colonel Alexei Rozanov, who masterminded the operation at the Russian president's direction, confirms Gabriel's death. The president withholds Quinn's payment, making it contingent on the operation's second phase, and orders Quinn eliminated after completion.

Gabriel forces Reza Nazari, an officer from Iran's intelligence service, VEVAK, to confess that he was planted on the Office to feed disinformation and that Rozanov recruited him to connect the SVR with Quinn. Gabriel uses Nazari to lure Rozanov to Hamburg. Meanwhile, Katerina Akulova departs Moscow to join Quinn for the second phase: assassinating Lancaster. She also carries secret orders to kill Quinn. On the ferry from Rotterdam, Quinn surprises Katerina, disarms her, and takes her hostage, planning to ransom her to SVR headquarters for twenty million dollars. Learning Gabriel is alive, Quinn insists on proceeding with the assassination.

In Hamburg, Gabriel's team kills Rozanov's driver and bodyguard in a precision ambush and seizes Rozanov from the crashed car. Under interrogation, Rozanov reveals that Quinn plans to strike Guy's Hospital the next afternoon and that the SVR has a mole inside MI6 named Arthur Grimes. Gabriel executes Rozanov. However, MI5 discovers the hospital threat is a feint: Quinn's real target is Madeline at Gabriel's cottage in Cornwall. Quinn and Katerina assault the cottage, kill four MI6 guards, and abduct Madeline. Grimes jumps to his death when confronted. Gabriel and Keller arrive by helicopter but too late. Quinn has escaped by sea with his captives aboard a fishing vessel.

Quinn brings Madeline and Katerina to a farm in Crossmaglen, South Armagh, the same farm where he once tortured Keller, and rallies IRA veterans to set an ambush. In Belfast, Gabriel learns that Billy Conway, Keller's former informant, was secretly working for Quinn all along and forced Maggie Donahue to plant Quinn's belongings in her house as bait. Keller executes Conway after Conway confesses he betrayed Keller's relationship with Elizabeth to the IRA decades earlier.

Gabriel and Keller cross the border into South Armagh on foot at nightfall and assault the farm under heavy fire. Inside the shed where the captives are held, Katerina kills IRA gunmen sent to execute Madeline, seizes a weapon, and provides covering fire. As Madeline stumbles toward Gabriel, Quinn shoots Katerina through the heart. Keller storms the farmhouse but Quinn has escaped. Gabriel catches Madeline as she collapses.

The Sunday Telegraph publishes an exposé linking Russia to the princess's murder and the bombings, and Lancaster imposes severe sanctions. Gabriel helps Keller reunite with his parents, then flies home to Jerusalem. He paints a mural bearing his dead son Dani's face on the nursery wall and visits Leah, his first wife, at her psychiatric hospital, where she has lived since the car bombing that killed Dani. He tells Leah about his new children, and she asks him to take care of the boy. Chiara goes to the hospital for a caesarean delivery.

Several months later, Keller, now an MI6 officer, tracks Quinn to Buenos Aires. He enters Quinn's apartment, waits for him to return, and shoots him twice: one bullet for Elizabeth Conlin, one for Dani Allon.