Moscow Rules

her bare shoulder.
     
     
    “Have the lobster-and-mango spring rolls to start,” he said. “I promise, your life will never be the same again.”
     

 
    39
     
     
    GASSIN, FRANCE
     
     
    At the old stone villa outside Gassin, dinner that evening had been a hasty affair: baguettes and cheese, a green salad, roasted chickens from the local charcuterie. Their ransacked bones lay scattered over the outdoor table like carrion, along with a heel of bread and three empty bottles of mineral water. At one end of the table lay a tourist brochure advertising deep-sea fishing trips in a sea now empty of fish. It might have looked like ordinary refuse were it not for the brief message, hastily scribbled over a photograph of a young boy holding a tuna twice his size. It had been written by Mikhail and passed to Yaakov, in a classic maneuver, in the Place Carnot. Gabriel was gazing at it now as if trying to rewrite it through the sheer force of his will. Eli Lavon was gazing at Gabriel, his chin resting in his palm, like a grandmaster pleading with a lesser opponent to either move or capitulate.
     
     
    “Maybe it’s the travel arrangements that bother me most,” Lavon said finally in an attempt to prod Gabriel into action. “Maybe I’m not comfortable with the fact that Ivan won’t let them come in their own car.”
     
     
    “Maybe he’s just a control freak.” Gabriel’s tone was ambivalent, as if he were expressing a possible explanation rather than a firmly held opinion. “Maybe he doesn’t want strange cars on his property. Strange cars can contain strange electronic equipment. Sometimes, strange cars can even contain bombs.”
     
     
    “Or maybe he wants to take them on a surveillance detection run before he lets them onto the property. Or maybe he’ll just skip the professional niceties and kill them immediately instead.”
     
     
    “He’s not going to kill them, Eli.”
     
     
    “Of course not,” said Lavon sarcastically. “Ivan wouldn’t lay a finger on them. After all, it’s not as if he didn’t kill a meddlesome reporter in broad daylight in St. Peter’s Basilica.” He held up a single sheet of paper, a printout of an NSA intercept. “Five minutes after Ivan left that restaurant, he was on the phone to Arkady Medvedev, the chief of his private security service, telling him to run a background check on Mikhail’s father and the Dillard Center.”
     
     
    “And when he does, he’ll find that Mikhail’s father was indeed a teacher who immigrated to America in the early nineties. And he’ll find that the Dillard Center occupies a small suite of offices on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington.”
     
     
    “Ivan knows about cover stories, and he certainly knows about CIA front organizations. The KGB was far better at it than Langley ever was. The Russians had a network of fronts all around the globe, some of them run by Ivan’s father, no doubt. Ivan drank KGB tradecraft with his mother’s milk. It’s in his DNA.”
     
     
    “If Ivan had qualms about Sarah and Mikhail, he wouldn’t let them come close to him. He’d push them away. And he’d make it clear to Elena that they were strictly off-limits.”
     
     
    “No, he wouldn’t. Ivan’s KGB. If he suspected Sarah and Mikhail weren’t kosher, he’d play it exactly like this. He’d put a team of watcherson them. He’d slip a bug in their hotel room to make sure they’re really who they say they are. And he’d invite them to lunch to try to find out how much they know about his network.”
     
     
    Gabriel, with his silence, conceded the point.
     
     
    “Cancel lunch,” said Lavon. “Arrange another bump.”
     
     
    “If we cancel, Ivan will know something’s not right. And there’s no way he’ll believe that another chance encounter is only a coincidence. We’ve flirted long enough. Elena’s clearly interested. It’s time to start talking about consummating the relationship. And the only way we can talk is by going to lunch at Ivan’s house.”
     
     
    Lavon picked up a chicken bone and searched it for a scrap of meat. “Do I need to remind you whom Sarah works for? And do I also need to remind you that Adrian Carter might not agree with your decision to send her in there tomorrow?”
     
     
    “Sarah might work for Langley, but she belongs to us. And as for a decision about what to do, I haven’t made one yet.”
     
     
    “What are you going to do, Gabriel?”
     
     
    “I’m going to sit here