“Too bad you didn’t kill him,” Chiara said.

“Don’t think it didn’t cross my mind.”

“How long will we keep him?”

“As long as we need to.”

“And then?”

“The Americans would like a word with him.”

“Someone needs to make sure he has an accident.”

“We’ll see.”

It was dark when they arrived in Narkiss Street. Gabriel could tell by the abundance of bodyguards they had a visitor waiting upstairs in the apartment. Uzi Navot was seated in the living room. He had a dossier. He had names. Eleven names. All former KGB. All living well in Western Europe on Ivan’s money. Navot left the folder with Gabriel and said he would wait to hear from him. Gabriel allowed Chiara to make the decision.

“Kill them all,” she said.

“It’s going to take time.”

“Take as much time as you need.”

“You won’t be able to come.”

“I know.”

“You’ll go to Tiberias. Gilah will look after you.”

THEY CONVENED the next morning in Room 456C of King Saul Boulevard: Yaakov and Yossi, Dina and Rimona, Oded and Mordecai, Mikhail and Eli Lavon. Gabriel arrived last and tacked eleven photographs to the bulletin board at the front of the room. Eleven photographs of eleven Russians. Eleven Russians who would not survive the summer. The meeting did not take long. The order of death was established, the assignments were made. Travel saw to the flights, Identity to the passports and visas. Housekeeping opened many doors. Banking gave them a blank check.

They left Tel Aviv in waves, traveled in pairs, and reconvened two weeks later in Barcelona. There, on a quiet street in the Gothic Quarter, Gabriel and Mikhail killed the man who had been walking behind Grigori on Harrow Road the evening of his abduction. For his sins he was shot at close range with.22 caliber Berettas. As he lay dying in the gutter, Gabriel whispered two words into his ear.

For Grigori…

A week later, in the Bairro Alto of Lisbon, he whispered the same two words to the woman who had been walking toward Grigori, the woman who had carried no umbrella and had been hatless in the rain. Two weeks after that, in Biarritz, it was the turn of her partner, the man who had been walking next to her on Westbourne Terrace Road Bridge. He heard the two words while taking a midnight stroll along La Grande Plage. They were spoken to his back. When he turned, he saw Gabriel and Mikhail, arms extended, guns in their hands.

For Grigori…

After that, news of the killings began to circulate among those still to die. To prevent the survivors from fleeing to Russia, the Office planted false stories that it was Ivan, not the Israelis, who was responsible. Ivan had launched a Great Terror, according to the rumors. Ivan was pruning the forest. Anyone foolish enough to set foot in Russia would be killed the Russian way, with great pain and extreme violence. And so the guilty stayed in the West, close to ground, below radar. Or so they thought. But one by one they were targeted. And one by one they died.

The driver of the Mercedes that took Irina to her “reunion” with Grigori was killed in Amsterdam in the arms of a prostitute. The driver of the van that carried Grigori on the first leg of his journey back to Russia was killed while leaving a pub in Copenhagen. The two flunkies sent to kill Olga Sukhova in Oxford were next. One died in Munich, the other in Prague.

It was then Sergei Korovin made a frantic attempt to intervene. “The SVR and FSB are getting itchy,” Korovin told Shamron. “If this continues, who knows where it might lead?” In a page taken from Ivan’s playbook, Shamron professed ignorance. Then he warned Korovin that the Russian services had better watch their step. Otherwise, they were next. By that evening, Office stations across Europe detected a notable increase in security around Russian embassies and known Russian intelligence officers. It was unnecessary, of course. Gabriel and his team had no interest in targeting the innocent. Only the guilty.

At that point, just four names remained. Four operatives who had carried out the abduction of Chiara in Umbria. Four operatives who had Office blood on their hands. They knew they were being stalked and tried not to remain in one place long. Fear made them sloppy. Fear made them easy pickings. They were killed in a series of lightning-strike operations: Warsaw, Budapest, Athens, Istanbul. While dying, they heard four words instead of two.

For Lior and Motti.

By then it was nearly August. It was time to go home again.

BUT WHAT of Ivan? For many weeks after the nightmare in the birch forest outside Moscow, he stayed out of sight. There were rumors he had been arrested. Rumors he had fled the country. Rumors, even, that he had been taken away by the FSB and killed. They were false, of course. Ivan was just observing another great Russian tradition, the tradition of internal exile. For Ivan, it was not marked by backbreaking labor or starvation rations. Ivan’s gulag was his fortresslike mansion in Zhukovka, the secret city of the oligarchs east of Moscow. And he had Yekaterina to soothe his wounds.

Though Ivan’s name was never publicly linked to the killing site in Vladimirskaya Oblast, its exposure seemed to do harm to his standing inside the Kremlin. In certain circles, much was made of the fact that Ivan’s development firm lost out on an important construction project. And that his nightclub was suddenly out of fashion with the siloviki and the other Moscow well connected. And that his luxury-car dealership saw a sudden sharp decrease in sales. These were false readings, though, more symptomatic of Russia’s troubled economy than any real decline in Ivan’s fortunes. What’s more, his arms dealings continued apace, weapons sales being one of the few bright spots in an otherwise bleak global financial climate. Indeed, British, American, and French intelligence all noticed a sharp spike in the number of Kharkov-owned aircraft touching down on isolated landing strips from the Middle East to Africa and beyond. And the Russian president continued to take his cut. The tsar, as Ivan liked to say, always took his cut.

NSA surveillance revealed that Ivan was aware of the systematic liquidation of Anton Petrov’s operatives and that it troubled him not at all. In Ivan’s mind, they had betrayed him and thus deserved the fate that befell them. In fact, throughout that long summer of retribution, he seemed obsessed by only two questions. Had his children been aboard the American jet that landed in Konakovo? And had they truly composed the letter of hatred handed to him by the pilot?

The children and their mother knew the answer, of course, along with the American president and a handful of his most senior officials. So, too, did the small band of Israeli intelligence officers who convened at sunset on the first Friday of August north of the ancient city of Tiberias. The occasion was Shabbat; the setting was Shamron’s honey-colored villa overlooking the Sea of Galilee. The entire team was present, along with Sarah Bancroft, who had decided to spend her August holiday with Mikhail in Israel. There were spouses Gabriel had never met and children he had only seen in photographs. The presence of so many children was difficult for Chiara, especially when she saw their faces lit by the glow of the Shabbat candles. As Gilah recited the blessing, Chiara took Gabriel’s hand and held it tightly. Gabriel kissed her cheek and heard again the words she had spoken to him in Umbria. We mourn the dead and keep them in our hearts. But we live our lives.

The summer spent by the lake had done wonders for Chiara’s appearance. Her skin was deeply tanned, and her riotous dark hair was aglow with gold and auburn highlights. She smiled easily throughout the meal and even burst into laughter when Bella scolded Uzi for taking a second portion of Gilah’s famous chicken with Moroccan spice. Watching her, Gabriel could almost imagine none of it had actually happened. That it had only been a dream from which they both had finally awakened. It wasn’t true, of course, and no amount of time would ever fully heal the wounds Ivan had inflicted. Chiara was like a newly restored painting, retouched and shimmering with a fresh coat of varnish but still damaged. She would have to be handled with great care.