Daniel Silva - Moscow Rules

Gabriel was a man of unnatural patience, but now, during the final tedious hours before their assault on Ivan’s vault of secrets, his patience abandoned him. It was fear, he thought. The kind of fear only Moscow can produce. The fear that someone was always watching. Always listening. The fear that he might find himself in Lubyanka once again and that this time he might not come out alive. The fear that others might join him there and suffer the same fate.

He attempted to suppress his fear with activity. He walked streets he loathed, ordered an elaborate lunch he barely touched, and, in the glittering GUM shopping mall near Red Square, purchased souvenirs he would leave behind. He performed these tasks alone; apparently, the FSB had no interest in Martin Stonehill, naturalized American citizen of Hamburg, Germany.

Finally, at 2:30 P.M., he returned to his room at the Ritz-Carlton and dressed for combat. His only weapons were a miniature radio and a PDA. At precisely 3:03 P.M., he boarded an elevator and rode down to the lobby. He paused briefly at the concierge’s desk to collect a handful of brochures and maps, then came whirling out the revolving door into Tverskaya Street. After walking a half block, he stopped and thrust his hand toward the street, as if hailing a taxi. A silver Volga sedan immediately pulled to the curb. Gabriel climbed inside and closed the door.

“Shalom,” said the man behind the wheel.

“Let’s hope so.”

Gabriel looked at his watch as the car shot forward: 3:06…

Time for one last good-bye, Elena. Time to get in the car.

Elena Kharkov slipped quietly into the guest bedroom and began to pack. The mere act of folding her clothing and placing it into her bag did much to calm her raw nerves and so she performed this chore with far more care than was warranted. At 3:20, she dialed the number of Sonia’s mobile phone. Receiving no answer, she was nearly overcome by a wave of panic. She dialed the number a second time- slowly, deliberately-and this time Sonia answered after three rings. In the most placid voice Elena could summon, she informed Sonia the children had had enough sun and that it was time to leave the beach. Sonia offered mild protest-the children, she said, were the happiest they had been in many days-but Elena insisted. When the call was over, she switched on the device that looked like an ordinary MP3 player and placed it in the outer compartment of her overnight bag. Then she dialed Sonia’s number again. This time, the call wouldn’t go through.

She finished packing and slipped into her mother’s bedroom. The money was where she had left it, in the bottom of the dresser, concealed beneath a heavy woolen sweater. She closed the drawer silently and went into the sitting room. Her mother looked at Elena and attempted to smile. They had nothing more to say-they had said it all last night-and no more tears to cry.

“You’ll have some tea before you leave?”

“No, Mama. There isn’t time.”

“Go, then,” she said. “And may the angel of the Lord be looking over your shoulder.”

A bodyguard, a former Alpha Group operative named Luka Osipo, was waiting for Elena outside in the corridor. He carried her suitcase downstairs and placed it in the trunk of a waiting limousine. As the car pulled away from the curb, Elena announced calmly that she needed to make a brief stop at the House on the Embankment to collect some papers from her husband’s office. “I’ll just be a moment or two,” she said. “We’ll still have plenty of time to get to Sheremetyevo in time for my flight.”

As Elena Kharkov’s limousine sped along the Kutuzovsky Prospekt, a second car was following carefully after it. Behind the wheel was a man named Anton Ulyanov. A former government surveillance specialist, he now worked for Arkady Medvedev, chief of Ivan Kharkov’s private security service. Ulyanov had performed countless jobs for Medvedev, most of questionable ethics, but never had he been ordered to watch the wife of the man who paid his salary. He did not know why he had been given this assignment, only that it was important. Follow her all the way to the airport, Medvedev had told him. And don’t lose sight of her. If you do, you’ll wish you’d never been born.

Ulyanov settled fifty yards behind the limousine and switched on some music. Nothing to do now but make himself comfortable and take a nice, boring drive to Sheremetyevo. Those were the kind of jobs he liked best: the boring jobs. Leave the excitement to the heroes, he was fond of saying. One tended to live longer that way.

As it turned out, the journey would be neither long nor boring. Indeed, it would end at the Ukraina Hotel. The offending car came from Ulyanov’s right, though later he would be forced to admit he never saw it. He was able to recall the moment of impact, though: a violent collision of buckling steel and shattering glass that sent his air bag exploding into his face. How long he was unconscious was never clear to him. He reckoned it was only a few seconds, because his first memory of the aftermath was the vision of a well-dressed man yelling through a blown-out window in a language he did not understand.

Anton Ulyanov did not try to communicate with the man. Instead, he began a desperate search for his mobile phone. He found it a moment later, wedged between the passenger seat and the crumpled door. The first call he made was to the Sparrow Hills apartment of Arkady Medvedev.

Upon his arrival at Côte d’Azur International Airport, Ivan Kharkov was escorted into a windowless conference room with a rectangular table and photographs of French-built aircraft on the wall. The man who had summoned him, François Boisson, was nowhere to be seen; indeed, a full thirty minutes would elapse before Boisson finally appeared. A slender man in his fifties with small eyeglasses and a bald head, he carried himself, like all French bureaucrats, with an air of condescending authority. Offering neither explanation nor apology for his tardiness, he placed a thick file at the head of the conference table and settled himself behind it. He sat there for an uncomfortably long period, fingertips pressed thoughtfully together, before finally bringing the proceedings to order.

“Two days ago, after your aircraft was refused permission to take off from this airport, we began a careful review of your flight records and passenger manifests. Unfortunately, in the process we have discovered some serious discrepancies.”

“What sort of discrepancies?”

“It is our conclusion, Monsieur Kharkov, that you have been operating your aircraft as an illegal charter service. Unless you can prove to us that is not the case-and, I must stress, in France the burden of proof in such matters is entirely on you -then I’m afraid your aircraft will be confiscated immediately.”

“Your accusation is complete nonsense,” Ivan countered.

Boisson sighed and slowly lifted the cover of his impressive file. The first item he produced was a photograph of a Boeing Business Jet. “For the record, Monsieur Kharkov, is this your aircraft?” He pointed to the registration number on the aircraft’s tail. “N7287IK?”

“Of course it’s my plane.”

Boisson touched the first character of the tail number: the N. “Your aircraft carries American registry,” he pointed out. “When was the last time it was in the United States?”

“I couldn’t say for certain. Three years at least.”

“Do you not find that odd, Monsieur Kharkov?”

“No, I do not find it the least bit odd. As you well know, Monsieur Boisson, aircraft owners carry American registry because American registry ensures a high resale value.”

“But according to your own records, Monsieur, you are not the owner of N7287IK.”