Moscow Rules

foyer. Then he turned toward the Kremlin and started walking. By the time he reached the middle of the Bolshoy Kamenny Bridge, his phone was working again. The first call he made was to the Sparrow Hills.
     

 
    58
     
     
    MOSCOW
     
     
    The floor was hardwood and recently polished. Even so, it took every bit of Elena’s strength to drag the two-hundred-pound unconscious body of Pyotr Luzhkov into the bathroom of the master bedroom suite. She locked the door from the inside, then made her way back to the entrance of Ivan’s office. The keypad was mounted at eye level on the left side. After punching in the eight-digit access code, she placed her thumb on the scanner. An alarm chirped three times and the armored door eased slowly open. Elena stepped inside and opened her handbag.
     
     
    The desk, like the man who worked there, was heavy and dark and entirely lacking in grace. It also happened to be one of Ivan’s most prized possessions, for it had once belonged to Yuri Andropov, the former head of the KGB who had succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as Soviet leader in 1982. The computer monitor and keyboard sat next to a silver-framed photograph of Ivan’s father in his KGB general’s uniform. The CPU was concealed beneath the desk on the floor. Elena crouched down and pressed the POWER button, then opened a small door on the front of the unit and plugged in the USB device that Gabriel had given her on the plane. After a few seconds, the drive engaged and the computer began to whir. Elena checked the monitor: a few characters of Hebrew, a time bar indicating that the job of copying the data files would take two minutes.
     
     
    She glanced at her wristwatch, then walked over to the set of ornate bookcases on the opposite side of the room. The button was hidden behind Ivan’s first edition of Anna Karenina —the second volume, to be precise. When pressed, the button caused the bookcases to part, revealing the door to Ivan’s vault. She punched the same eight-digit code into the keypad and again placed her thumb on the scanner pad. Three chirps sounded, followed this time by the dull thud of the locks.
     
     
    The interior light came on automatically as she pulled open the heavy door. Ivan’s secret disks, the gray matter of his network of death, stood in a neat row on a shelf. One shelf below were some of the proceeds of that network: rubles, dollars, euros, Swiss francs. She started to reach for the money but stopped when she remembered the blood. The blood shed by men wielding Ivan’s weapons. The blood of children forced to fight in Ivan’s wars. She left the money on the shelf and took only the disks. The disks that would help Gabriel find the missiles. The disks that Gabriel would use to destroy her husband.
     
     
    At the edge of Serafimovicha Street lies a broad traffic island. Like most in Moscow, it is cluttered day and night with parked cars. Some of the cars that afternoon were foreign and new; others were Russian and very old, including a battered Lada of uncertain color and registry occupied by Uzi Navot and his driver from Moscow Station. Navot did not appear happy, having witnessed several developments that had led him to conclude the operation was rapidly unraveling. He had shared that view with the rest of his teammates in the calmest voice he could manage. But now, as he watched Luka Osipov coming back over the Bolshoy Kamenny Bridge at a dead sprint, he knew that the time for composure had passed. “He’s on his way back,” he murmured into his wrist mike. “And it looks like we’re in serious trouble.”
     
     
    Though Shmuel Peled had no radio, the steadily darkening expression on Gabriel’s face told him everything he needed to know.
     
     
    "Are we losing her, boss? Tell me we’re not losing her.”
     
     
    “We’ll know soon enough. If she comes out of that building with her handbag over her left shoulder, everything is fine. If she doesn’t . . .” He left the thought unfinished.
     
     
    “What do we do now?”
     
     
    “We wait. And we hope to God she can talk her way back into her car.”
     
     
    “And if she doesn’t come out?”
     
     
    “Speak Russian, Shmuel. You’re supposed to be speaking Russian.”
     
     
    The young driver resumed his ersatz Russian monologue. Gabriel stared at the western façade of the House on the Embankment and listened for the sound of Uzi Navot’s voice.
     
     
    Luka Osipov had gained fifteen pounds since leaving the Alpha