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Rome in the morning.”
     
     
    “Let me come with you.”
     
     
    “I’ve already lost one wife to my enemies. I don’t want to lose another. ”
     
     
    “So what am I supposed to do while you’re gone?”
     
     
    “Make sure no one steals the Poussin. His Holiness will be rather miffed if it vanishes while in my possession.” He kissed her and started toward the door. “And whatever you do, don’t try to follow me. Uzi put a security detail at the front gate.”
     
     
    “Bastard,” she murmured as he started down the steps.
     
     
    “I heard that, Chiara.”
     
     
    She picked up the remote and pointed it at the television.
     
     
    “Good.”
     

 
    6
     
     
    ROME
     
     
    To call it a safe flat was no longer accurate. Indeed, Gabriel had spent so much time in the pleasant apartment near the top of the Spanish Steps that the lords of Housekeeping, the division of the Office that handled secure accommodations, referred to it as his Rome address. There were two bedrooms, a large, light-filled sitting room, and a spacious terrace that looked west toward the Piazza di Spagna and St. Peter’s Basilica. Two years earlier, Gabriel had been standing in the shadow of Michelangelo’s dome, at the side of His Holiness Pope Paul VII, when the Vatican was attacked by Islamic terrorists. More than seven hundred people were killed that October afternoon, and the dome of the Basilica had nearly been toppled. At the behest of the CIA and the American president, Gabriel had hunted down and killed the two Saudis who masterminded and financed the operation. The pope’s powerful private secretary, Monsignor Luigi Donati, knew of Gabriel’s involvement in the killings and tacitly approved. So, too, Gabriel suspected, did the Holy Father himself.
     
     
    The flat had been fitted with a system capable of recording the time and duration of unwanted entries and intrusions. Even so, Gabriel inserted an old-fashioned telltale between the door and the jamb as he let himself out. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust the geniuses in the Office’s Technical division; he was simply a man of the sixteenth century at heart and clung to antiquated ways when it came to matters of tradecraft and security. Computerized telltales were wonderful devices, but a scrap of paper never failed, and it didn’t require an engineer with a Ph.D. from MIT to keep it running.
     
     
    It had rained during the night, and the pavements of the Via Gregoriana were still damp as Gabriel stepped from the foyer. He turned to the right, toward the Church of the Trinità dei Monti, and descended the Spanish Steps to the piazza, where he drank his first cappuccino of the day. After deciding that his return to Rome had gone unnoticed by the Italian security services, he hiked back up the Spanish Steps and climbed aboard a Piaggio motorbike. Its little four-stroke engine buzzed like an insect as he sped down the graceful sweep of the Via Veneto.
     
     
    The Excelsior Hotel stood near the end of the street, near the Villa Borghese. Gabriel parked on the Corso d’Italia and locked his helmet in the rear storage compartment. Then he put on a pair of dark wraparound sunglasses and a ball cap and headed back to the Via Veneto on foot. He walked nearly the length of the boulevard to the Piazza Barberini, then crossed over to the opposite side and headed back toward the Villa Borghese. Along the way, he spotted four men he assumed to be plainclothes American security—the U.S. Embassy stood at Via Veneto 121—but no one who appeared to be an agent of Russian intelligence.
     
     
    The waiters at Doney were setting the sidewalk tables for lunch. Gabriel went inside and drank a second cappuccino while standing at the bar. Then he walked next door to the Excelsior and lifted the receiver of a house phone near the elevators. When the operator came on the line, he asked to speak to a guest named Boris Ostrovsky and was connected to his room right away. Three rings