15 MOSCOW

They drove to the Old Arbat in her car, an ancient pea soup green Lada with a dangling front bumper. She knew a place where they could talk: a Georgian restaurant with stone grottoes and faux streams and waiters in native dress. It was loud, she assured him. Bedlam. “The owner looks a little too much like Stalin for some people. ” She pointed out the window at another one of the Seven Sisters. “The Ukraina Hotel.”

“World’s biggest?”

“We cannot live as normal people.”

She left the car in a flagrantly illegal space near Arbat Square and they walked to the restaurant through the fading late-afternoon light. She had been right about the owner-he looked like a wax figure of Stalin come to life-and about the noise as well. Gabriel had to lean across the table a few degrees to hear her speak. She was talking about an anonymous tip the Gazeta had received before the New Year. A tip from a source whose name she could never divulge…

“This source told us that an arms dealer with close ties to the Kremlin and our president was about to conclude a major deal that would put some very dangerous weapons into the hands of some very dangerous people.”

“What kind of people?”

“The kind you have been fighting your entire life, Mr. Golani. The kind who have vowed to destroy your country and the West. The kind who fly airplanes into buildings and set off bombs in crowded markets.”

“Al-Qaeda?”

“Or one of its affiliates.”

“What type of weapons?”

“We don’t know.”

“Are they conventional?”

“We don’t know.”

“Chemical or biological?”

“We don’t know.”

“But you can’t rule it out?”

“We can’t rule anything out, Mr. Golani. For all we know, the weapons could be radiological or even nuclear.” She was silent for a moment, then managed a cautious smile, as if embarrassed by an awkward pause in the conversation. “Perhaps it would be better if I simply told you what I do know.”

She was now gazing at him intently. Gabriel heard a commotion to his left and glanced over his shoulder. Stalin was seating a group of people at the neighboring table: two aging mobsters and their high-priced professional dates. Olga took note of them as well and continued speaking.

“The source who provided us with the initial tip about the sale is impeccable and assured us that the information was accurate. But we couldn’t print a story based on a single source. You see, unlike many of our competitors, the Gazeta has a reputation for thoroughness and accuracy. We’ve been sued many times by people who didn’t like what we wrote about them but we’ve never lost, not even in the kangaroo courts of Russia.”

“So you started asking questions?”

“We’re reporters, Mr. Golani. That’s what we do. Our investigation unearthed a few intriguing bits but nothing specific and nothing we could publish. We decided to send one of our reporters to Courchevel to follow the arms dealer in question. The dealer owns a chalet there. A rather large chalet, actually.”

“The reporter was Aleksandr Lubin?”

She nodded her head slowly. “I assume you know the details from the news accounts. Aleksandr was murdered within a few hours of his arrival. Obviously, it was a warning to the rest of the Gazeta staff to back off. I’m afraid it had the opposite effect, though. We took Aleksandr’s murder as confirmation the story was true.”

“And so you kept digging?”

“Carefully. But, yes, we kept digging. We were able to uncover much about the arms dealer’s operations in general, but were never able to pin down the specifics of a deal. Finally, the matter was taken out of our hands entirely. Quite unexpectedly, the owner of the Gazeta decided to sell the magazine. I’m afraid he didn’t reach the decision on his own; he was pressured into the sale by the Kremlin and the FSB. Our new owner is a man with no experience in journalism whatsoever, and his first move was to appoint a publisher with even less. The publisher announced that he was no longer interested in hard news or investigative journalism. The Gazeta was now going to focus on celebrity news, the arts, and life in the New Russia. He then held a meeting with Boris Ostrovsky to review upcoming stories. Guess which story he killed first?”

“An investigation into a possible deal between a Russian arms trafficker and al-Qaeda.”

“Exactly.”

“I assume the time of the sale wasn’t a coincidence.”

“No, it wasn’t. Our new owner is an associate of the arms dealer. In all likelihood, it was the arms dealer who put up all the money. Rather remarkable, don’t you think, Mr. Golani? Only in Russia.”

She reached into her handbag and withdrew a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. “Do you mind?”

Gabriel shook his head, and glanced around the restaurant. One of the mobsters had his hand on the bare thigh of his date, but there were no signs of any watchers. Olga lit her cigarette and placed the pack and lighter on the table.

“The sale of the magazine presented us with a terrible dilemma. We believed the story about the missile sale to be true, but we now had no place to publish it. Nor could we continue to investigate the story inside Russia. We decided on another course of action. We decided to make our findings known to the West through a trusted figure inside Israeli intelligence.”

"Why me? Why not walk over to the U.S. Embassy and tell the CIA station chief?”

“It is no longer wise for members of the opposition or the press to meet with American officials, especially those who also happen to work for the CIA. Besides, Boris always admired the secret intelligence service of Israel. And he was especially fond of a certain agent who recently got his picture in the paper for saving the life of the daughter of the American ambassador to London.”

“And so he decided to leave the country and contact us in Rome?”

“In keeping with the new mission of the Gazeta, he told our publisher he wanted to do a piece about Russians at play in the Eternal City. After he arrived in Rome, he made contact with your embassy and requested a meeting. Obviously, the arms dealer and his security service were watching. I suspect they’re watching now.”

“Who is he? Who is the arms dealer?”

She said a name, then picked up the wine list and opened the cover.

“Let’s have something to drink, shall we, Mr. Golani? Do you prefer red or white?”

Stalin brought the wine. It was Georgian, bloodred, and very rough. Gabriel’s thoughts were now elsewhere. He was thinking of the name Olga Sukhova had just spoken. It was familiar to him, of course. Everyone in the trade had heard the name Ivan Kharkov.

“How much do you know about him, Mr. Golani?”

“The basics. Former KGB turned Russian oligarch. Passes himself off as a legitimate investor and international businessman. Lives mainly in London and France.”

“Those are the basics. May I give you a more thorough version of the story?”

Gabriel nodded his head. Olga braced herself on her elbows and held the wineglass near her face with both hands. Between them, a candle flickered in a red bowl. It added blush to her pale cheeks.

“He was a child of Soviet privilege, our Ivan. His father was high-ranking KGB. Very high-ranking. In fact, when he retired, he was the chief of the First Main Directorate, the foreign espionage division. Ivan spent a good part of his childhood abroad. He was permitted to travel, while ordinary Soviet citizens were kept prisoner in their own country. He had blue jeans and Rolling Stones records, while ordinary Soviet teenagers had Communist propaganda and Komsomol weekends in the country. In the days of shortages, when the workers were forced to eat seaweed and whale meat, he and his family had fresh veal and caviar.”