Daniel Silva - Moscow Rules

“And what happens if Ivan Kharkov ever finds out? I’ll end up like that poor bloke, Litvinenko, dying an agonizing death in University College Hospital with my hair falling out.”

“We’ll make certain Ivan never gets anywhere near you. And the fact that you were never married and have no children makes our job much easier.”

“What about Old George and Mrs. Devlin?”

“We’ll have to deceive them, of course. You might have to let them go.”

“Can’t do that. Old George worked for my father. And Mrs. Devlin has been with me for nearly thirty years. We’ll just have to work around them.”

“So you’ll do it, then?”

Boothby nodded. “If you gentlemen truly believe I’m up to the job, then it would be my honor to join you.”

“Excellent,” said Seymour. “That leaves only the small matter of the painting itself. If Elena Kharkov wants to buy it, we have no choice but to sell it to her.”

Boothby brought his hand down on the table hard enough to rattle the china and the crystal. “Under no circumstances am I selling that painting to the wife of a Russian arms dealer.”

Gabriel patted his lips with his napkin. “There is another possible solution-something your father would have enjoyed.”

“What’s that?”

"A deception, of course.”

They hiked up the grand central staircase beneath yellowed portraits of Boothbys dead and gone. The nursery was in semidarkness when they entered; Boothby pushed open the heavy curtains, allowing the golden Cotswold light to stream through the tall, mullioned windows. It fell upon two matching children’s beds, two matching children’s dressers, two matching hand-painted toy chests, and Two Children on a Beach by Mary Cassatt.

“My father bought it in Paris between the wars. Didn’t pay much for it, as I recall. By then, Madame Cassatt had fallen out of fashion. My mother and sisters adored it, but, to be honest, I never much cared for it.”

Gabriel walked over to the painting and stood before it in silence, right hand to his chin, head tilted slightly to one side. Then he licked three fingers of his right hand and scrubbed away the surface grime from the chubby knee of one of the children. Boothby frowned.

“I say, Gabriel. I hope you know what you’re doing.”

Gabriel took two steps back from the painting and calculated its dimensions.

“Looks like thirty-eight by twenty-nine.”

“Actually, if memory serves, it’s thirty-eight and three-quarters by twenty-nine and a quarter. You obviously have quite an eye.”

Gabriel gave no indication he had heard the compliment. “I’m going to need a place to work for a few days. Somewhere quiet. Somewhere I’m not going to be disturbed.”

“There’s an old gamekeeper’s cottage at the north end of the property. I did a bit of renovation a few years back. Usually, it’s rented this time of year, but it’s vacant for the next several weeks. The entire second floor was converted into a studio. I think you’ll find it to your liking.”

“Please tell Mrs. Devlin that I’ll see to my own cleaning. And tell Old George not to come snooping around.” Gabriel resumed his appraisal of the Cassatt, one hand pressed to his chin, head tilted slightly to one side. “I don’t like people watching me while I work.”

The following morning, Gabriel gave MI5 an operational shopping list the likes of which it had never seen. Whitcombe, who had developed something of a professional infatuation with the legendary operative from Israel, volunteered to fill it. His first stop was L. Cornelissen amp; Son in Great Russell Street, where he collected a large order of brushes, pigment, medium, ground, and varnish. Next, it was up to Camden Town for a pair of easels, then over to Earl’s Court for three commercial-grade halogen lamps. His final two stops were just a few doors apart in Bury Street: Arnold Wiggins amp; Sons, where he ordered a lovely carved frame in the French style, and Dimbleby Fine Arts, where he purchased a work by a largely unknown French 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.