Moscow Rules

a start that she vowed never to go near him again. Margherita took to singing as she went about her chores, which only seemed to annoy him more.
     
     
    At first, he did not venture beyond the Etruscan walls of the garden. There, he would spend afternoons beneath the shade of the trellis, drinking his Orvieto wine and reading until his eye became too fatigued to continue. Sometimes, when it was warm, he would wander down to the pool and wade carefully into the shallow end, making certain to keep his bandaged eye above water. Other times, he would lie on his back on the chaise and toss a tennis ball into the air, for hours on end, as if testing his vision and reactions. Each time he returned to the villa, he would pause in the drawing room and stare at the empty studio. Margherita took note of the fact that he would not stand in his usual spot, directly before the easels, but several paces away. “It’s as if he’s trying to imagine himself working again,” she told Anna. “The poor man isn’t at all sure he’ll ever lay his hands on another painting.”
     
     
    He soon felt strong enough to resume his walks. In the beginning, they were not long, nor were they conducted at a rapid pace. He wore wraparound sunglasses to cover his eyes and a cotton bucket hat pulled down to the bridge of his nose. Some days, the woman accompanied him, but usually he walked alone, with only the dogs for company. Isabella greeted him pleasantly each time he passed the stables, even though she usually received only a taciturn nod in return. His mood improved with exercise, though, and once he actually stopped for a few minutes to chat about the horses. Isabella offered to give him riding lessons when his eye had healed, but he made no response other than to turn his gaze skyward to watch a jetliner on final approach to Fiumicino Airport. “Are you afraid?” Isabella asked him. Yes, he admitted as the plane disappeared behind a khaki-colored hill. He was very afraid.
     
     
    With each passing day, he walked a little farther, and by the middle of October he was able to hike to the gate and back each morning. He even began venturing into the woods again. It was during one such outing, on the first chilly day of the season, that the Villa dei Fiori echoed with a single crack of a small-caliber weapon. The restorer emerged from the trees a few moments later with a sweater knotted casually round his neck and the dogs howling with bloodlust. He informed Carlos that he had been charged by a wild boar and that the boar, unfortunately, had not survived the encounter. When Carlos looked for evidence of a gun, the restorer seemed to smile. Then he turned and set out down the gravel road toward the villa. Carlos found the animal a few minutes later. Between its eyes was a bloodless hole. Small and neat. Almost as if it had been painted with a brush.
     
     
    The next morning, the Villa dei Fiori, along with the rest of Europe, awoke to the stunning news that a disaster of unimaginable proportions had been narrowly averted. The story broke first in London, where the BBC reported that Scotland Yard was conducting “major terrorism-related raids” in East London and in neighborhoods near Heathrow and Gatwick airports. Later that morning, a sober-looking British prime minister went before the cameras at Downing Street to inform the nation that the security services had disrupted a major terrorist plot aimed at simultaneously destroying several airliners in British airspace. It was not the first time a plot such as this had been uncovered in Britain. What set this one apart, though, were the weapons involved: SA-18 shoulder-launch antiaircraft missiles. British police had found twelve of the sophisticated weapons during their early-morning raids and, according to the prime minister, were frantically searching for more. He refused to say where the terrorists had obtained the missiles but pointedly reminded reporters of the name of the country where the weapons were manufactured: Russia. Finally, in a chilling endnote, the prime minister stated that the plot had been “global in scope” and warned reporters that they had a long day ahead.
     
     
    Ten minutes later, in Paris, the French president strode before the cameras at the Élysée Palace and announced that a similar round of police raids had been carried out that same morning in the suburbs of Paris and in the South of France. Twenty missiles had been found thus far, ten in an apartment