Daniel Silva - Moscow Rules

“Do you think she’ll come?”

“She’ll come.”

Gabriel took the phone from her grasp and asked how she knew the Cassatt was a forgery.

“It was the hands.”

“What about the hands?”

“The brushstrokes were too impasto.”

“Sarah told me the same thing.”

“You should have listened to her.”

Just then the phone rang. Gabriel handed it to Elena.

“Da?” she said, then: “ Da, da. ”

She looked at Gabriel.

“Flash the lights, Gabriel. She wants you to flash the headlights.”

Gabriel flicked the headlamps twice. Elena spoke a few more words in Russian. The eleventh-floor window went dark.

The vendemmia, the annual harvest of the wine grapes, commenced at the Villa dei Fiori on the final Saturday in September. It coincided with the unwelcome news that the restorer was planning to return to Umbria. Count Gasparri briefly considered making the drive from Rome to inform the staff in person. In the end, he decided a quick telephone call to Margherita would suffice.

“When is he scheduled to arrive?” she asked, her voice heavy with dread.

“This is unclear.”

“But of course. Will he be alone or accompanied by Francesca?”

“This is also unclear.”

“Should we assume he’ll be working again?”

“That is the hope,” Gasparri said. “But my friends at the Vatican tell me he’s been in some sort of accident. I wouldn’t expect him to be in a terribly good mood.”

“How will we tell the difference?”

“Be kind to him, Margherita. Apparently, the poor man’s been through quite an ordeal.”

And with that the line went dead. Margherita hung up the phone and headed out to the vineyards.

The poor man’s been through quite an ordeal…

Yes, she thought. And now he’s going to take it out on us.

The ‟return,” as it became known to the staff, occurred late that same evening. Carlos, who lived in a stone cottage on a hill above the pasture, spotted the little Passat wagon as it turned through the gate and started down the gravel road toward the villa with its headlamps doused. He quickly telephoned Isabella, who was standing on the veranda of her residence near the stables as the blacked-out car flashed by in a cloud of dust. Her observation, though brief, yielded two critical pieces of information: the car definitely contained not one but two people-the restorer and the woman they knew as Francesca-and the woman was driving. Strong circumstantial evidence, she told Carlos, that the restorer had indeed suffered an accident of some sort.

The last member of the staff to see the couple that night was Margherita, who watched them cross the courtyard from her static post above the chapel. Like all housekeepers, Margherita was a natural watcher-and, like any good watcher, she took note of small details. She found it odd, to say the least, that the woman was leading the way. She also thought she could detect something different about the restorer’s movements. Something vaguely hesitant in his step. She saw him once more, when he appeared in the upstairs window and gazed in her direction over the courtyard. There was no soldierly nod this time; in fact, he gave no indication that he was even aware of her presence. He just peered into the gloom, as if searching for an adversary that he knew was there but could not see.

The shutters closed with a thump and the restorer disappeared from sight. Margherita remained frozen in her window for a long time after, haunted by the image she had just seen. A man in a moonlit window with a heavy bandage over his right eye.

Unfortunately, Count Gasparri’s predictions about the restorer’s mood turned out to be accurate. Unlike in summer, when he had been predictably aloof, his moods now fluctuated between chilling silences and flashes of alarming temper. Francesca, while apologetic, offered few clues about how he had sustained the injury, stating only that he had suffered “a mishap” while working abroad. Naturally, the staff was left to speculate as to what had actually happened. Their theories ranged from the absurd to the mundane. They were certain of one thing: the injury had left the restorer dangerously on edge, as Anna discovered one morning when she approached him from behind while he was struggling to read the newspaper. His sudden movement gave her such a start that she vowed never to go near him again. Margherita took to singing as she went about her chores, which only seemed to annoy him more.

At first, he did not venture beyond the Etruscan walls of the garden. There, he would spend afternoons beneath the shade of the trellis, drinking his Orvieto wine and reading until his eye became too fatigued to continue. Sometimes, when it was warm, he would wander down to the pool and wade carefully into the shallow end, making certain to keep his bandaged eye above water. Other times, he would lie on his back on the chaise and toss a tennis ball into the air, for hours on end, as if testing his vision and reactions. Each time he returned to the villa, he would pause in the drawing room and stare at the empty studio. Margherita took note of the fact that he would not stand in his usual spot, directly before the easels, but several paces away. “It’s as if he’s trying to imagine himself working again,” she told Anna. “The poor man isn’t at all sure he’ll ever lay his hands on another painting.”

He soon felt strong enough to resume his walks. In the beginning, they were not long, nor were they conducted at a rapid pace. He wore wraparound sunglasses to cover his eyes and a cotton bucket hat pulled down to the bridge of his nose. Some days, the woman accompanied him, but usually he walked alone, with only the dogs for company. Isabella greeted him pleasantly each time he passed the stables, even though she usually received only a taciturn nod in return. His mood improved with exercise, though, and once he actually stopped for a few minutes to chat about the horses. Isabella offered to give him riding lessons when his eye had healed, but he made no response other than to turn his gaze skyward to watch a jetliner on final approach to Fiumicino Airport. “Are you afraid?” Isabella asked him. Yes, he admitted as the plane disappeared behind a khaki-colored hill. He was very afraid.

With each passing day, he walked a little farther, and by the middle of October he was able to hike to the gate and back each morning. He even began venturing into the woods again. It was during one such outing, on the first chilly day of the season, that the Villa dei Fiori echoed with a single crack of a small-caliber weapon. The restorer emerged from the trees a few moments later with a sweater knotted casually round his neck and the dogs howling with bloodlust. He informed Carlos that he had been charged by a wild boar and that the boar, unfortunately, had not survived the encounter. When Carlos looked for evidence of a gun, the restorer seemed to smile. Then he turned and set out down the gravel road toward the villa. Carlos found the animal a few minutes later. Between its eyes was a bloodless hole. Small and neat. Almost as if it had been painted with a brush.

The next morning, the Villa dei Fiori, along with the rest of Europe, awoke to the stunning news that a disaster of unimaginable proportions had been narrowly averted. The story broke first in London, where the BBC reported that Scotland Yard was conducting “major terrorism-related raids” in East London and in neighborhoods near Heathrow and Gatwick airports. Later that morning, a sober-looking British prime minister went before the cameras at Downing Street to inform the nation that the security services had disrupted a major terrorist plot aimed at simultaneously destroying several airliners in British airspace. It was not the first time a plot such as this had been uncovered in Britain. What set this one apart, though, were the weapons involved: SA-18 shoulder-launch antiaircraft missiles. British police had found twelve of the sophisticated weapons during their early-morning raids and, according to the prime minister, were frantically searching for more. He refused to say where the terrorists had obtained the missiles but pointedly reminded reporters of the name of the country where the weapons were manufactured: Russia. Finally, in a chilling endnote, the prime minister stated that the plot had been “global in scope” and warned reporters that they had a long day ahead.