Moscow Rules

sends his love.”
     
     
    “I’m sure he does,” Gabriel said absently. “How is he?”
     
     
    “He’s beginning to grumble.”
     
     
    “What’s bothering him now?”
     
     
    “Your security arrangements at the villa. He thinks they’re less than satisfactory.”
     
     
    “Precisely five people know I’m in the country: the Italian prime minister, the chiefs of his intelligence and security services, the pope, and the pope’s private secretary.”
     
     
    “He still thinks the security is inadequate.” Navot hesitated. “And I’m afraid that, given recent developments, I must concur.”
     
     
    “What recent developments?”
     
     
    Navot placed his big arms on the table and leaned forward a few inches. “We’re picking up some rumblings from our sources in Egypt. It seems Sheikh Tayyib is rather upset with you for foiling his well-laid plan to bring down the Mubarak government. He’s instructed all Sword of Allah operatives in Europe and the Middle East to begin looking for you at once. Last week, a Sword agent crossed into Gaza and asked Hamas to join in the search.”
     
     
    “I take it our friends in Hamas agreed to help.”
     
     
    “Without hesitation.” Navot’s next words were spoken not in French but in quiet Hebrew. “As you might imagine, the Old Man is hearing these reports about the gathering threats to your life, and he is fixated on one single thought: Why is Gabriel Allon, Israel’s avenging angel and most capable secret servant, sitting on a cattle ranch in the hills of Umbria restoring a painting for His Holiness Pope Paul the Seventh?”
     
     
    Gabriel looked out at the view. The sun was sinking toward the distant hills in the west and the first lights were coming up on the valley floor. An image flashed in his memory: a man with a gun in his outstretched hand, firing bullets into the face of a fallen terrorist, beneath the North Tower of Westminster Abbey. It appeared to him in oil on canvas, as if painted by the hand of Caravaggio.
     
     
    “The angel is on his honeymoon,” he said, his gaze still focused on the valley. “And the angel is in no condition to work again.”
     
     
    “We don’t get honeymoons, Gabriel—not proper ones, in any case. As for your physical condition, God knows you went through hell at the hands of the Sword of Allah. No one would blame you if you left the Office for good this time.”
     
     
    “No one but Shamron, of course.”
     
     
    Navot picked at the tablecloth but made no reply. It had been nearly a decade since Ari Shamron had done his last tour as chief, yet he still meddled with the affairs of the Office as though it were his personal fiefdom. For several years, he had done so from Kaplan Street in Jerusalem, where he had served as the prime minister’s chief adviser on matters of security and counterterrorism. Now, aged and still recovering from a terrorist attack on his official car, he pulled the levers of influence from his fortresslike villa overlooking the Sea of Galilee.
     
     
    “Shamron wants me locked in a cage in Jerusalem,” Gabriel said. “He thinks that if he can make my life miserable enough, I’ll have no other choice but to take over control of the Office.”
     
     
    “There are worse fates in life, Gabriel. A hundred men would give their right arm to be in your position.” Navot lapsed into silence, then added, “Including me.”
     
     
    “Play your cards carefully, Uzi, and someday the job will be yours.”
     
     
    “That’s the way I got the job as chief of Special Ops—because you refused to take it. I’ve spent my career living in your shadow, Gabriel. It’s not easy. It makes me feel like a consolation prize.”
     
     
    “They don’t promote consolation prizes, Uzi. If they didn’t think you were worthy of the job, they would have left you in the European post and found someone else.”
     
     
    Navot seemed eager to change the subject. “Let’s have something to eat,” he suggested. “Otherwise, the waiter might think we’re a couple of spies, talking business.”
     
     
    “That’s it, Uzi? Surely you didn’t come all the way to Umbria just to tell me that people wanted me dead.”
     
     
    “Actually, we were wondering whether you might be willing to do us a favor.”
     
     
    “What sort of favor?”
     
     
    Navot opened his menu and frowned. “My God, look at all this pasta.”
     
     
    “You don’t like pasta, Uzi?”
     
     
    “I love pasta,