The Defector

when the men with black hoods emerged from the trees. Their weapons dispensed death with little more than a whisper. Motti had been hit first, Lior second. Chiara had been reaching for her Beretta when she was given a single disabling blow to the side of her head. Then she had felt a stab in her right thigh, an injection of sedative that made her head spin and turned her limbs to deadweight. The last thing she remembered was the face of a woman looking down at her. Behave and we might let you live , the woman said in Russian-accented English. Then the woman’s face turned to water, and Chiara lost consciousness.
    Now she was adrift in a world that was part dream, part memory. For hours she wandered lost through the streets of her native Venice as the floodwaters of the acqua alta swirled round her knees. In a church in Cannaregio she found Gabriel seated atop a work platform, conversing softly with Saint Christopher and Saint Jerome. She took him to a canal house near the old Jewish ghetto and made love to him in sheets soaked with blood, while Leah, his wife, watched from her wheelchair in the shadows. A parade of other images filed past, some nightmarish in their depiction, others rendered accurately. She relived the day Gabriel told her he could never marry her. And the day, not two years later, when he threw her a surprise wedding on Shamron’s terrace overlooking the Sea of Galilee. She walked with Gabriel through the snow-covered killing grounds of Treblinka and knelt over his broken body in a sodden English pasture, pleading with him not to die.
    Finally, she saw Gabriel in a garden in Umbria, surrounded by walls of Etruscan stone. He was playing with a child—not the child he had lost in Vienna but the child Chiara had given to him. The child now growing inside her . She had been a fool to lie to Gabriel. If only she had told him the truth, he would have never gone to London to keep his promise to Grigori Bulganov. And Chiara would not be the prisoner of a Russian woman.
    A woman who was now standing over her. Syringe in hand. She had milk-white skin and eyes of translucent blue, and appeared to be having difficulty maintaining her balance. This was neither dream nor hallucination. At that moment, Chiara and the woman were caught in a sudden squall in the middle of the Adriatic. Chiara did not know this, of course. She only knew that the woman nearly toppled while giving her an injection of sedative, inserting the needle with far more force than was necessary. Slipping once more into unconsciousness, Chiara returned again to the garden in Umbria. Gabriel was bidding farewell to the child. It wandered into a field of sunflowers and disappeared.

    CHIARA WOKE once more during the journey, this time by the drone of an aircraft in flight and the stench of her own vomit. The woman was standing over her again, another loaded syringe in hand. Chiara promised to behave, but the woman shook her head and inserted the needle. As the drug took effect, Chiara found herself wandering frantically through the field of sunflowers, searching for the child. Then night fell like a curtain, and she was weeping hysterically with no one to console her.
    When next she regained consciousness, it was to the sensation of intense cold. For a moment she thought it was another hallucination. Then she realized she was on her feet and somehow walking through snow. Her hands were cuffed and secured to her body by nylon tape, her ankles shackled. The chains of the shackles abbreviated her stride to little more than a shuffle. The two men holding her arms seemed not to mind. They seemed to have all the time in the world. So did the woman with milk-white skin.
    She was walking a few paces ahead, toward a small cottage surrounded by birch trees. Parked outside were a pair of Mercedes sedans. Judging from their low profile, they had armor plating and bulletproof windows. Leaning against the hood of one was a man: black leather coat, silver hair, head like a tank turret. Chiara had never met him in person but had seen the face many times in surveillance photographs. His powerful aftershave hung like an invisible fog on the brittle air. Sandalwood and smoke. The smell of power. The smell of the devil.
    The devil smiled seductively and touched her face. Chiara recoiled, instantly nauseated. At the devil’s command, the two men led her into the cottage and down a flight of narrow wooden stairs. At the bottom was a heavy metal door with a thick