Moscow Rules

landscapist. Painted outside Paris in 1884, its dimensions were 29 inches by 38 inches.
     
     
    By afternoon, the painting and the supplies were at Havermore, and Gabriel was soon at work in the second-floor studio of the old game-keeper’s cottage. Though advances in modern technology gave him considerable advantages over the great copyists of the past, he confined himself largely to the tried-and-true methods of the Old Masters. After subjecting the Cassatt to a surface examination, he snapped more than a hundred detail photographs and taped them to the walls of the studio. Then he covered the painting with a translucent paper and carefully traced the image beneath. When the sketch was complete, he removed it and made several thousand tiny perforations along the lines he had just drawn. He then transferred the tracing to the second canvas—which had been stripped bare and covered in a fresh ground—and carefully sprinkled charcoal powder over the surface. A moment later, when he removed the paper, a ghost image of Two Children on a Beach appeared on the surface.
     
     
    A copyist of lesser gifts might have produced two or three drafts of the painting before attempting the final version, but Gabriel felt no need to practice, nor was he possessed with an abundance of time. He placed the easels side by side, with Cassatt’s original on the left, and immediately prepared his first palette. He worked slowly for the first few days, but as he grew more accustomed to Cassatt’s style, he was able to apply the paint to the canvas with increasing confidence and swiftness. Sometimes he had the sensation she was standing at his shoulder, carefully guiding his hand. Usually, she appeared to him alone, in a floor-length dress and ladylike bonnet, but occasionally she would bring along her mentors—Degas, Renoir, and Pissarro—to instruct him on the finer points of palette and brushwork.
     
     
    Though the painting consumed most of Gabriel’s attention, Ivan and Elena Kharkov were never far from his thoughts. NSA redoubled its efforts to intercept all of Ivan’s electronic communications, and Adrian Carter arranged for a man from London Station to make regular trips to Havermore to share the take. As a child of the KGB, Ivan had always been careful on the telephone and remained so now. He spent those days largely sequestered in his walled mansion in Zhukovka, the restricted secret city of the oligarchs west of Moscow. Only once did he venture outside the country: a day trip to Paris to spend a few hours with Yekatarina, his supermodel mistress. He phoned Elena three times from Yekatarina’s bed to say that his business meetings were going splendidly. One of the calls came while she was dining with two companions at the exclusive Café Pushkin, and the moment was captured by an Office watcher with a miniature camera. Gabriel couldn’t help but be struck by the melancholy expression on her face, especially when compared to the outward gaiety of her two companions. He tacked the picture to the wall of his makeshift studio and called it Three Ladies in a Moscow Café .
     
     
    One salient operational fact eluded Gabriel: the precise date Ivan and Elena were planning to leave Moscow and return to Knightsbridge. As he labored alone before the canvas, he became gripped by a fear he was about to throw an elaborate party that no one would attend. It was an irrational notion; Ivan Kharkov tolerated his native country only in small doses and it was only a matter of time before he would be overcome by the urge to leave it once more. Finally, an MI5 team monitoring the Kharkov mansion in Rutland Gate witnessed the delivery of a large consignment of vodka, champagne, and French wine—strong evidence, they argued, of Ivan’s impending return. The next day, NSA intercepted a telephone call from Ivan to Arkady Medvedev, the chief of his personal security and intelligence service. Buried within a lengthy discussion about the activities of a Russian rival was the nugget of intelligence for which Gabriel had been so anxiously waiting: Ivan was coming to London in a week for what he described as a round of important business meetings. After leaving London, he would travel to the South of France to take up residence at Villa Soleil, his sumptuous summer palace overlooking the Mediterranean Sea near Saint-Tropez.
     
     
    That evening, Gabriel ate dinner while standing before the canvas. Shortly after nine, he heard the sound of car