“Ari gave you numerous opportunities to extricate yourself from this affair, but you chose to press on. Usually, it’s the other way around. Usually, Shamron’s the one doing the pushing and you’re the one digging in your heels. Why now, Gabriel? After everything you’ve been through, after all the fighting and the killing, why would you prefer to do a job like this rather than hide out in a secluded villa in Umbria with me?”
“It’s not fair to put it in those terms, Chiara.”
“Of course it is. You told me it was going to be a simple job. You were going to meet with a Russian journalist in Rome, listen to what he had to say, and that was going to be the end of it.”
“It would have been the end of it, if he hadn’t been murdered.”
“So you’re doing this for Boris Ostrovsky? You’re risking your life, and Elena’s, because you feel guilty over his death?”
“I’m doing this because we need to find those missiles.”
“You’re
“Of course I want to destroy Ivan.”
“Well, at least you’re being honest. Just make sure you don’t destroy yourself in the process. If you take his wife and children, he’s going to pursue them to the ends of the earth. And us, too. If we’re very lucky, this operation might be over in forty-eight hours. But your war with Ivan will just be getting started.”
“We should eat, Chiara. After all, it’s our anniversary.”
She looked at her wristwatch. “It’s too late to eat. That butter will go straight to my hips.”
“I was planning a similar maneuver myself.”
“Promises, promises.” She drank some more of the wine. “Did you enjoy working with Sarah again?”
“You’re not going to start that again, are you?”
“Let the record show, your honor, that the witness refused to answer the question.”
“Yes, Chiara, I did enjoy working with Sarah again. She performed her job admirably and with great professionalism.”
“And does she still adore you?”
“Sarah knows I’m unavailable. And the only person she adores more than me is you.”
“So you admit it?”
“Admit what?”
“That she adores you.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. Yes, Sarah had feelings for me once, feelings that surfaced in the middle of a very dangerous operation. I don’t happen to share those feelings because I’m quite madly in love with you. I proved that to you, I
“She was probably hoping you were going to leave me stranded at the chuppah.”
“Chiara.” He took her face in his hands and kissed her mouth. Her lips were cool and tasted of the Chasselas. “This will all be over in forty-eight hours. Then we can go back to Italy, and no one, not even Ivan, will be able to find us there.”
“No one but Shamron.” She kissed him again. “I thought you were planning a maneuver that had something to do with my hips.”
“You have a very long day tomorrow.”
“Put the table outside in the hall, Gabriel. I can’t make love in a room that smells like Chicken Kiev.”
Afterward, she slept in his arms, her body restless, her mind troubled by dreams. Gabriel did not sleep; Gabriel never slept the night before an operation. At 3:59, he called the front desk to say a wake-up call would not be necessary, and gently woke Chiara with kisses on the back of her neck. She made love to him one final time, pleading with him throughout to send someone else to Moscow in his place. At five o’clock, she left the room in her crisp El Al uniform and headed downstairs to the lobby, where Rimona and Yaakov were waiting along with the rest of the crew. Gabriel watched from his window as they climbed into a shuttle bus for the ride to the airport and remained there long after they had gone. His gaze was focused on the storm clouds gathering over the distant mountain peaks. His thoughts, however, were elsewhere. He was thinking of an old woman in a Moscow apartment reaching for a telephone, with Eli Lavon, the man she knew only as Feliks, calmly reminding her of her lines.
52 VILLA SOLEIL, FRANCE
They had arrived at an uneasy truce. It had taken seventy-two hours. Seventy-two hours of screaming. Seventy-two hours of threats of malicious divorce. Seventy-two hours of on-and-off interrogation. Like all those who have been betrayed, he demanded to be told the details. She had resisted at first, but under Ivan’s withering assault she had eventually surrendered. She paid the information out slowly, inch by inch. The drive into the hills. The lunch that had been waiting on the table. The wine. The little bedroom with its tacky Monet prints. Her baptismal shower. Ivan had demanded to know how many times they had made love. “Twice,” she confessed. “He wanted to do it a third time but I told him I had to be going.”
Mikhail’s predictions had proven accurate; Ivan’s rage, while immense, had subsided quickly once he realized he had brought the mess upon himself. He sent a team of bodyguards to Cannes to eject Yekatarina from her suite at the Carlton Hotel, then began to deluge Elena with apologies, promises, diamonds, and gold. Elena appeared to accept the acts of contrition and made several of her own. The matter was now closed, they declared jointly over dinner at Villa Romana. Life could resume as normal.
Many of Ivan’s gestures were surely hollow. Many others were not. He spent less time talking on his mobile phone and more time with the children. He kept his Russian friends at bay and canceled a large birthday party he had been planning to throw for a business associate whom Elena did not like. He brought her coffee each morning and read the papers in bed instead of rushing into his office to work. And when her mother called that morning at seven o’clock, he did not grimace the way he usually did but handed Elena the phone with genuine concern on his face. The conversation that followed was brief. Elena hung up the phone and looked at Ivan in distress.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
'She’s very sick again, darling. She needs me to come right away.”
In Moscow, Svetlana Federov gently returned the receiver to its cradle and looked at the man she knew as Feliks.
'She says she’ll be here later this evening.”
'And Ivan?”
“He wanted to come with her, but Elena convinced him to stay in France with the children. He was kind enough to let her borrow his airplane.”
“Did she happen to say what time she was departing?”
“She’s leaving Nice airport at eleven o’clock, provided there are no problems with the plane, of course.”
He smiled and withdrew a small device from the breast pocket of his rumpled jacket. It had a tiny screen and lots of buttons, like a miniature typewriter. Svetlana Federov had seen such devices before. She did not know what they were called, only that they were usually carried by the sort of men she did not like. He typed something rapidly with his agile little thumbs and returned the device to his pocket. Then he looked at his watch.
“Knowing your son-in-law, he’ll have you and your building under surveillance within the hour. Do you remember what you’re supposed to say if anyone asks about me?”
“I’m to tell them that you were a con artist-a thief who had come to swindle an old woman out of her money.”
“There really are a lot of unscrupulous characters in the world.”
“Yes,” she said. “One can never be too careful.”
In the aftermath of the most recent terrorist attacks in London, many improvements in security and operational capabilities had been made to the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, some the public could see, many others they could not. Among those that fell into the second category was a sparkling new operations center, located in a bunkerlike annex beneath the square itself. At precisely 6:04 A.M. London time, Eli Lavon’s message was handed to Adrian Carter with funereal silence by a young CIA factotum. Carter, after reading it, handed it to
