45 THE MASSIF DES MAURES, FRANCE

They adjourned to the terrace. It was small, cluttered with potted herbs and flowers, and shaded by a pair of umbrella pine. An ancient olive grove spilled into a small gorge, and on the opposite hillside stood two tiny villas that looked as though they had been rendered by the hand of Cézanne. Somewhere in the distance, a child was crying hysterically for its mother. Elena did her best to ignore it while she told Gabriel the rest of the story. Her quiet lunch with Olga Sukhova. The nightmare of Aleksandr Lubin’s murder in Courchevel. The near breakdown she had suffered after Boris Ostrovsky’s death in St. Peter’s Basilica.

“I shut myself off from the outside world. I stopped watching television. I stopped reading the newspaper. I was afraid-afraid that I would learn an airplane had been shot down, or another journalist had been murdered because of me. Eventually, as time went by, I was able to convince myself it had never actually happened. There were no missiles, I told myself. There was no delegation of warlords who had come to my home to buy weapons from my husband. There was no secret plan to divert a portion of the consignment to the terrorists of al-Qaeda. In fact, there were no terrorists at all. It had all been a bad dream. A misunderstanding of some sort. A hoax. Then I got a telephone call from my friend Alistair Leach about a painting by Mary Cassatt. And here I am.”

On the other side of the ravine, the child was still wailing. “Won’t someone help that poor thing?” She looked at Gabriel. “Do you have children, Mr. Allon?”

He hesitated, then answered truthfully. “I had a son,” he said quietly. “A terrorist put a bomb in my car. He was angry at me because I killed his brother. It exploded while my wife and son were inside.”

“And your wife?”

“She survived.” He gazed silently across the gorge for a moment. “It might have been better if she hadn’t. It took me a few seconds to get her out of the car. She was burned very badly in the fire.”

“My God, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t-”

“It’s all right, Elena. It was a long time ago.”

“Did it happen in Israel?”

“No, not in Israel. It was in Vienna. Not far from the cathedral.”

On the other side of the ravine, the child fell silent. Gabriel seemed not to notice, for all his considerable concentration was now focused on the task of opening a bottle of rosé. He filled a single glass and handed it to Elena.

“Drink some. It’s important you have wine on your breath when you go home. Ivan will expect that.”

She raised the glass to her lips and watched the pine trees moving in the faint breeze.

“How did this happen? How did we end up together in this place, you and I?”

“You were brought here by a telephone you shouldn’t have answered. I was brought here by Boris Ostrovsky. I was the reason he went to Rome. He was trying to tell me about Ivan. He died in my arms before he could deliver his message. That’s why I had to go to Moscow to meet with Olga.”

“Were you with her when the assassins tried to kill her?”

He nodded his head.

“How were you able to escape that stairwell without being killed?”

“Perhaps another time, Elena. Drink some of your wine. You need to be a bit tipsy when you go home.”

She obeyed, then asked, “So, in the words of Lenin, glorious agent of the Revolution and father of the Soviet Union, what is to be done? What are we going to do about the missiles my husband has placed in the hands of murderers?”

“You’ve given us a tremendous amount of information. If we’re lucky-very lucky-we might be able to find them before the terrorists are able to carry out an attack. It will be difficult, but we’ll try.”

“Try? What do you mean? You have to stop them.”

“It’s not that easy, Elena. There’s so much we don’t know. Which country in Africa was your husband dealing with? Have the missiles been shipped? Have they already reached the hands of the terrorists? Is it already too late?”

His questions had been rhetorical but Elena reacted as though they had been directed toward her.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I feel like such a fool.”

“Whatever for?”

“I thought that by simply telling you about the deal, you would have enough information to find the weapons before they could be used. But what have I accomplished? Two people are dead. My friend is a prisoner in her Moscow apartment. And my husband’s missiles are still out there somewhere.”

“I didn’t say it was impossible, Elena. Only that it was going to be difficult.”

“What else do you need?”

“A paper trail would help.”

“What does that mean?”

“End-user certificates. Invoices. Shipping records. Transit documents. Banking records. Wire transfers. Anything we can lay our hands on to track the sale or the flow of the merchandise.”

She was silent for a moment. Her voice, when finally she spoke, was barely audible over the sound of the wind moving in the treetops.

“I think I know where that information might be,” she said.

Gabriel looked at her. “Where, Elena?”

“In Moscow.”

“Is it somewhere we can get to it?”

“Not you. I would have to do it for you. And I would have to do it alone.”

My husband is a devout Stalinist. It is not something he generally acknowledges, even in Russia.”

Elena drank a bit of the rosé, then held it up to the fading sunlight to examine the color.

“His love of Stalin has influenced his real estate purchases. Zhukovka, the area where we now live outside Moscow, was actually a restricted dacha village once, reserved for only the most senior Party officials and a few special scientists and musicians. Ivan’s father was never senior enough in rank to earn a dacha in Zhukovka, and Ivan was always deeply resentful of this. After the fall of the Soviet Union, when it became possible for anyone with enough money to acquire property there, he bought a plot of land that had been owned by Stalin’s daughter. He also bought a large apartment in the House on the Embankment. He uses it as a pied-à-terre and keeps a private office there. I also assume he uses it as a place to take his lovers. I’ve been only a few times. It’s filled with ghosts, that building. The residents say that if you listen carefully at night, you can still hear the screaming.”

She looked at Gabriel for a moment in silence.

“Do you know the building I’m talking about, Mr. Allon? The House on the Embankment?”

“The big building on Serafimovicha Street with the Mercedes-Benz star on top. It was built for the most senior members of the nomenklatura in the early thirties. During the Great Terror, Stalin turned it into a house of horror.”

“You’ve obviously done your homework.” She peered into the wineglass. “Stalin murdered nearly eight hundred residents of that building, including the man who lived in my husband’s apartment. He was a senior official in the Foreign Ministry. Stalin’s henchmen suspected him of being a spy for the Germans, and for that he was taken to the killing fields of Butovo and shot. No one really knows how many of Stalin’s victims are buried out there. A few years ago, the government turned the property over to the Orthodox Church, and they’ve been carefully searching for the remains ever since. There is no sadder place in Russia than Butovo, Mr. Allon. Widows and orphans filing past the trenches, wondering where their husbands and fathers might lie. We mourn Stalin’s victims in Butovo while men like my husband pay millions for their flats in the House on the Embankment. Only in Russia.”

“Where’s the flat?”

“On the ninth floor, overlooking the Kremlin. He and Arkady keep a guard on duty there twenty-four hours a day. The doors to Ivan’s office have a wood veneer, but underneath they’re bombproof steel. There’s a keypad entrance with a biometric fingerprint scanner. Only three people have the code and fingerprint clearance: Ivan, Arkady, and me. Inside the office is a password-protected computer. There’s also another vault, same keypad and biometric scanner, same password and procedure. All my husband’s secrets are in that vault. They’re stored on disks with KGB encryption software.”