At midnight, when the table had been cleared and the dishes washed, they filed upstairs to their rooms for a few hours of sleep. Gabriel and Chiara, alone in the master suite, made quiet love. Afterward, they lay next to each other in the darkness, Gabriel staring at the ceiling, Chiara tracing her fingertip along his cheek.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“Moscow,” he said.
“What are you doing?”
“Watching Irina.”
“What do you see?”
“I’m not quite sure yet.”
Chiara was silent for a moment. “You’re never happier than when they’re around, Gabriel. Maybe Uzi was right. Maybe the Office is the only family you have.”
“You’re my family, Chiara.”
“Are you sure you want to leave them?”
“I’m sure.”
“I hear Shamron has other plans.”
“He usually does.”
“When are you going to tell him that you’re not going to take the job?”
“As soon as I get Grigori back from the Russians.”
“Promise me one thing, Gabriel. Promise me you won’t get too close to Ivan.” She kissed his lips. “Ivan likes to break pretty things.”
24
THE NORTHERN Italian Travel Association, or NITA, occupied a suite of small offices on a narrow pedestrian lane in the town of Bellagio-or so it claimed. Its stated mission was to encourage tourism in northern Italy by aggressively promoting the region’s incomparable beauty and lifestyle, especially to booking agents and travel writers in other countries. A website for the association appeared soon after Gabriel’s team convened on the opposite side of the lake at Villa Teresa. So, too, did a handsome brochure, printed not in Italy but in Tel Aviv, along with an invitation to the third annual winter seminar and showcase at the Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni-odd, since no one at the Serbelloni would have recalled a first annual showcase and seminar, or even a second for that matter.
With only seventy-two hours until the start of the conference, the organizers were dismayed to learn of a last-minute cancellation and began searching for a replacement. The name Irina Bulganova of Galaxy Travel, Tverskaya Street, Moscow, came quickly to mind. Were NITA an ordinary travel association, there might have been some question as to whether Ms. Bulganova would be able to come to Italy on such short notice. NITA, however, possessed means and methods unavailable to even the most sophisticated organizations. They hacked into her computer and inspected her appointment calendar. They read her e-mail and listened to her telephone calls. Their colleagues in Moscow followed Ms. Bulganova wherever she went and even had a peek at her passport to make certain it was in order.
Their inquiries revealed much about the tangled state of her personal affairs. They learned, for example, that Ms. Bulganova had recently stopped seeing her lover for the vaguest of reasons. They learned she was having trouble sleeping at night and preferred music to television. They learned she had recently placed a telephone call to FSB Headquarters requesting information as to the whereabouts of her former husband, a question greeted by a curt dismissal. All things considered, they believed a woman in Ms. Bulganova’s position might relish the opportunity to make an all-expenses-paid visit to Italy. And what Muscovite wouldn’t? On the day the invitation was sent, the weather forecast was calling for heavy snow and temperatures of perhaps twenty below.
It was dispatched via e-mail and signed by none other than Veronica Ricci, NITA’s chief executive officer. It began with an apology for the last-minute nature of the offer and concluded with promises of first-class air travel, luxury hotel accommodations, and gourmet Italian cuisine. If Ms. Bulganova chose to attend-and it was NITA’s fervent hope that she would-an information packet, airline tickets, and a welcoming gift would follow. The e-mail neglected to say that the aforementioned materials were already in Moscow and would be delivered by a courier company that did not exist. Nor did it mention the fact that Ms. Bulganova would remain under surveillance to make certain she was not being followed by agents of Ivan Kharkov. It made only one request: that she RSVP as quickly as possible so that other arrangements could be made should she be unable to attend.
Fortunately, such a contingency would not prove necessary, for exactly seven hours and twelve minutes after the e-mail was sent, a reply arrived from Moscow. At Villa Teresa, the celebration was boisterous but brief. Irina Bulganova was coming to Italy. And they had much work to do.
IN EVERY OPERATION, Shamron was fond of saying, there is a choke point. Navigate it successfully, and the operation can sail easily into open waters. Stray off course, even by a few degrees, and it can become stranded on the shoals or, worse still, smash to pieces on the rocks. For this operation, the choke point was none other than Irina herself. As of that moment, they still did not know whether she was heaven-sent or whether she might bring the devil to their doorstep. Handle her well, and the operation might go down as one of the team’s finest. Make one mistake, and there was a chance she might get them all killed.
They rehearsed as if their lives depended on it. Mikhail’s Russian was superior to Eli Lavon’s, and so it was Mikhail, despite his youth, who would serve as lead inquisitor. Lavon, blessed with a kindly face and unthreatening demeanor, would play the role of benefactor and sage. The only variable, of course, was Irina herself. Olga helped them to prepare for any contingency. At Gabriel’s direction, she was terrified one minute, belligerent the next. She cursed them like dogs, collapsed in tears, took a vow of silence, and once flew at them in a blind rage. By the final night, Mikhail and Lavon were confident they were prepared for whatever version of Irina they might encounter. All they needed now was the star of the show.
But was she Ivan’s pawn or Ivan’s victim? It was the question that had troubled them from the beginning, and it was foremost in their thoughts throughout the last long night of waiting. Gabriel made it clear he believed in Irina, but Gabriel was the first to admit his faith had to be viewed through the prism of his well-known fondness for Russian women. The women, he said over and over, were Russia’s only hope. Other members of the team, Yaakov in particular, took a far less optimistic view of what lay ahead. Yaakov had seen mankind at its worst and feared they were about to admit one of Ivan’s agents into their midst. The fact she was still alive, he argued, was proof of her perfidy. “If Irina was good, Ivan would have killed her,” he said. “That’s what Ivan does.”
With the help of their assets in Moscow and King Saul Boulevard, they kept careful watch over Irina’s final preparations, searching for evidence of treachery. On the evening before her departure they monitored a pair of telephone calls, one to a childhood friend, the other to her mother. They heard her alarm go off at the ungodly hour of 2:30 a.m. and heard it go off again ten minutes later while she was in the shower. And at five minutes past three, they caught a flash of her temper when she called the limousine company to say her car hadn’t arrived. Mikhail, who listened to a recording of the call over the secure link, refused to translate it for the rest of the team. Unless Irina was an award-winning actress, he said, her anger was real.
As it turned out, the car was only fifteen minutes late, something of a coup for late January, and she arrived at Sheremetyevo Airport at 3:45. Shmuel Peled, a field hand from Moscow Station, caught a glimpse of her as she emerged from the car in an angry blur and headed into the terminal. Her plane, Austrian Airlines Flight 606, departed on time and arrived at Vienna’s Schwechat at 6:47 a.m. local time. Dina, who had flown to the Austrian capital the previous day, was waiting when Irina emerged from the Jet-way. They walked to the departure gate, separated by a generous gap, and settled into their seats in the third row of the first-class cabin-Irina in 3C along the aisle, Dina in 3A against the window. Upon touching down in Milan, she sent a message to Gabriel. The star had arrived. The show was about to begin.