She looked down at her shabby old housecoat.
“Ask him to wait five minutes. Then send him up.”
She hung up the phone. Flowers and chocolates . . . He might look like a pile of discarded laundry, but apparently he was still a gentleman.
She went into the kitchen and looked for something suitable to serve. There were no pastries or cakes in the pantry, only a tin of English tea biscuits, a souvenir from her last dreadful trip to London to see Elena. She arranged a dozen biscuits neatly on a plate and laid the plate on the sitting-room table. In the bedroom, she quickly exchanged her housecoat for a summery frock. Standing before the mirror, she coaxed her brittle gray hair into appropriate condition and stared sadly at her face. There was nothing to be done about that. Too many years, she thought. Too much heartache.
She was leaving her room when she heard the ping of the bell. Opening the door, she was greeted by the sight of an odd-looking little man in his early sixties, with a head of wispy hair and the small, quick eyes of a terrier. His clothing, as advertised, was rumpled, but appeared to have been chosen with considerable care. There was something old-fashioned about him. Something bygone. He looked as though he could have stepped from an old black-and-white movie, she thought, or from a St. Petersburg coffeehouse during the days of revolution. His manners were as dated as his appearance. His Russian, though fluent, sounded as if it had not been used in many years. He certainly wasn’t a Muscovite; in fact, she doubted whether he was a Russian at all. If someone were to put her on the spot, she would have said he was a Jew. Not that she had anything against the Jews. It was possible she was a little Jewish herself.
“I do hope I’m not catching you at an inconvenient time,” he said.
“I was just watching television. The president was making an important speech.”
“Oh, really? What was he talking about?”
“I’m not sure. They’re all the same.”
The visitor handed her the flowers and the chocolates. “I took the liberty. I know how you adore truffles.”
“How did you know that?”
“Elena told me, of course. Elena has told me a great deal about you.”
“How do you know my daughter?”
“I’m a friend, Mrs. Federov. A trusted friend.”
“She sent you here?”
“That’s correct.”
“For what reason?”
“To discuss something important with you.” He lowered his voice. “Something concerning the well-being of Elena and the children.”
“Are they in some sort of danger?”
“It would really be better if we spoke in private, Mrs. Federov. The matter is of the utmost sensitivity.”
She regarded him suspiciously for a long moment before finally stepping to one side. He moved past her without a sound, his footsteps silent on the tiled hall. Like he was floating, she thought with a shiver as she chained the door. Like a ghost.
51
GENEVA
It is said that travelers who approach Geneva by train from Zurich are frequently so overcome by its beauty that they hurl their return tickets out the window and vow never to leave again. Arriving by car from Paris, and in the middle of a lifeless August night, Gabriel felt no such compulsion. He had always found Geneva to be a charming yet intensely boring city. Once a place of Calvinistic fervor, finance was the city’s only religion now, and the bankers and moneymen were its new priests and archbishops.
His hotel, the Métropole, was near the lake, just across the street from the Jardin Anglais. The night manager, a diminutive man of immaculate dress and expressionless features, handed over an electronic key and informed him that his wife had already checked in and was upstairs awaiting his arrival. He found her seated in a wingback chair in the window, with her long legs propped on the sill and her gaze focused on the Jet d’Eau, the towering water fountain in the center of the lake. Her El Al uniform, crisp and starched, hung from the rod in the closet. Candlelight reflected softly in the silver-domed warmers of a room service table set for two. Gabriel lifted a bottle of frigid Chasselas from the ice bucket and poured himself a glass.
“I expected you an hour ago.”
“The traffic leaving Paris was miserable. What’s for dinner?”
“Chicken Kiev,” she said without a trace of irony in her voice. Her eyes were still trained on the fountain, which was now red from the colored spotlights. “The butter’s probably congealed by now.”
Gabriel placed his hand atop one of the warmers. “It’s fine. Can I pour you some wine?”
“I shouldn’t. I have a four o’clock call. I’m working the morning flight from Geneva to Ben-Gurion, then the afternoon flight from Ben-Gurion to Moscow.” She looked at him for the first time. “You know, I think it’s possible El Al flight attendants might actually get less sleep than Office agents.”
“No one gets less sleep than an Office agent.” He poured her a glass of the wine. “Have a little. They say it’s good for the heart.”
She accepted the glass and raised it in Gabriel’s direction. “Happy anniversary, darling. We were married five months ago today.” She took a drink of the wine. “So much for our honeymoon in Italy.”
“Five months isn’t really an anniversary, Chiara.”
“Of course it is, you dolt.”
She looked out at the fountain again.
“Are you angry with me because I’m late for dinner, Chiara, or is something else bothering you?”
“I’m angry with you because I don’t feel like going to Moscow tomorrow.”
“Then don’t go.”
She shot an annoyed look at him, then turned her gaze toward the lake again.
“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 doing this, Gabriel, because you want to destroy Ivan.”
“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 hope, by marrying you—in spectacular fashion, I might add. If memory serves, Sarah was in attendance.”
“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 Shamron, who in turn handed it to Graham Seymour. “Looks like we’re on,” said Seymour. “I suppose you’d better cue the Frogs.”
Carter activated a secure line to Paris with the press of a button and brought the receiver to his ear. “Bonjour, gentlemen. The ball is now heading toward your side of the court. Do try to enjoy yourselves.”
This time there was no indecision in her grooming. Elena bathed hastily, expended little effort on her hair and makeup, and dressed in a rather simple but comfortable Chanel pantsuit. She put on more jewelry than she might otherwise have worn on such an occasion and slipped several more expensive pieces into her handbag. Finally, she placed two additional changes of clothing in an overnight bag and took several thousand dollars’ worth of euros and rubles from the wall safe. She knew that Ivan would not find this suspicious; Ivan always encouraged her to carry a substantial amount of cash when traveling alone.
She took a final look around the room and started downstairs with as much detachment as she could summon. Sonia and the children had gathered to see her off; she held the children for longer than she should have and ordered them with mock sternness to behave for their father. Ivan was not a witness to their farewell; he was standing outside in the drive, scowling impatiently at his wristwatch. Elena kissed each child one final time, then climbed into the back of the Mercedes with Ivan. She glanced once over her shoulder as the car shot forward and saw the children weeping hysterically. Then the car passed through the security gate and they disappeared from sight.
Word of Ivan and Elena Kharkov’s departure from Villa Soleil arrived at the operations room in London at 7:13 A.M. local time. Gabriel was informed of the development five minutes later. One hour after receiving the message, he informed the front desk that he was checking out of his room and that his stay, while far too brief, had been lovely. His rented Renault was waiting for him by the time he stepped outside. He climbed behind the wheel and headed for the airport.