Moscow Rules

new cover identity, and her superiors at the CTC have given her extremely high marks.”
     
     
    “Not surprising, Adrian. She’s a star. God only knows why your recruiters rejected her in the first place.”
     
     
    “They thought she was too independent—and maybe a bit too intelligent. We’re not like you, Gabriel. We like our case officers to think inside the box.”
     
     
    “And you wonder why your most talented operatives are working for private contractors now.”
     
     
    “Spare me the critique, Gabriel. Do you want to use her or not?”
     
     
    “I’ll know after I talk to her.”
     
     
    “She comes on duty in the CTC at noon.”
     
     
    “Langley?” Gabriel shook his head. “I want to see her somewhere the Agency isn’t listening.”
     
     
    “That narrows our options considerably.” Carter made a show of careful consideration. “How about Dumbarton Oaks? The gardens, at noon.”
     
     
    “Just make sure she’s alone.”
     
     
    Carter smiled sadly. “Thanks to you, Gabriel, she never goes anywhere alone. And she probably never will.”
     

 
    26
     
     
    DUMBARTON OAKS, GEORGETON
     
     
    The sun managed to burn through the veil of haze by mid-morning, and by the time Gabriel presented himself at the entrance of Dumbarton Oaks it had grown appallingly hot. He purchased an admission ticket from a man in a little booth and was handed a glossy brochure. He consulted it frequently while he strolled past the elaborate arbors, trellises, and ornamental pools. A few minutes after noon, he made his way to a distant corner of the gardens, where he found an attractive woman in her early thirties seated primly on a wooden bench, a paperback book open in her lap, lilies of the valley at her feet. She wore a simple cotton sundress and sandals. Her blond hair had grown out since he had seen her last; her alabaster skin was beginning to turn red from the intense sun. She looked up sharply as Gabriel approached, but her face remained oddly expressionless, as if it had been rendered by the hand of Mary Cassatt.
     
     
    “Were you able to spot Adrian’s watchers?” asked Sarah Bancroft.
     
     
    He kissed her cheek and led her toward the shade of a nearby trellis. “A nearsighted probationer fresh out of the academy could have spotted Adrian’s watchers.”
     
     
    "Let’s hear it.”
     
     
    “Woman with the sunhat, man with the plaid Bermuda shorts, the couple wearing matching ‘I Love New York’ shirts.”
     
     
    “Very good. But you missed the two boys in the dark sedan on R Street.”
     
     
    “I didn’t miss them. They might as well have just waved hello to me as I came inside.”
     
     
    They sat down together, but even in the shade there was little relief from the heavy wet heat. Sarah pushed her sunglasses into her hair and brushed a trickle of perspiration from her cheek. Gabriel gazed at her in profile while her eyes flickered restlessly around the gardens. The daughter of a wealthy Citibank executive, Sarah Bancroft had spent much of her childhood in Europe, where she had acquired a Continental education along with a handful of Continental languages and impeccable Continental manners. She had returned to America to attend Dartmouth, and later, after spending a year studying at the prestigious Courtauld Institute of Art in London, became the youngest woman ever to earn a Ph.D. in art history at Harvard. While finishing her dissertation, she began dating a young lawyer named Ben Callahan, who had the misfortune of boarding United Airlines Flight 175 on the morning of September 11, 2001. He managed to make one telephone call before the plane plunged into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. That call was to Sarah. Gabriel had given her the chance that Langley had denied her: to fight back against the murderers. With Carter’s blessing, and with the help of a lost Van Gogh, he had inserted her into the entourage of a Saudi billionaire named Zizi al-Bakari and ordered her to find the terrorist mastermind lurking within it. She had been lucky to survive. Her life had never been the same since.
     
     
    “I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” he said.
     
     
    “Why ever would you think that? Because in the midst of a very tense operation, I committed the terribly unprofessional act of confessing my true feelings for you?”
     
     
    “That was one reason.”
     
     
    “You don’t have to worry about that, Gabriel. I’m over you now.” She looked at him