“You’d better,” the Gatekeeper said, “because the chancellor is giving him quite an earful about Ukraine.”

“What time should I be there?”

“Five o’clock,” said the Gatekeeper, and the line went dead. Alexei Rozanov replaced the receiver and watched the snow falling on the grounds of Yasenevo. Then he thought about a coffin being loaded onto an Israeli jetliner at Heathrow Airport while an old man stood at attention on the tarmac, and for the first time in almost a year he actually smiled.

In point of fact, it had been ten months to the day. Ten months since Alexei Rozanov had learned that his old friend and comrade Pavel Zhirov had been found in a birch forest in Tver Oblast, frozen solid, two bullets in his brain. Ten months since he had been summoned to the Kremlin for a meeting with the federal president himself. The Boss wanted Rozanov to undertake a mission of vengeance. A series of messy killings wouldn’t do. The Boss wanted to punish his enemies in a way that would sow discord among their ranks and make them think twice about ever interfering in Russia’s affairs again. More than anything, though, the Boss wanted to make certain that Gabriel Allon never became chief of Israel’s secret intelligence service. The Boss had big plans. He wanted to restore Russia’s faded glory, reclaim its lost empire. And Gabriel Allon, an intelligence operative from a minuscule country, was one of his most meddlesome opponents.

Rozanov had thought long and hard about his plan, had plotted it with care and assembled the necessary pieces. Then, with the blessing of the federal president, he had ordered the killing that had set the operational wheels turning. Graham Seymour, the chief of MI6, had reacted the way Rozanov had expected he would. So had Allon. Now his body lay in the belly of a jetliner bound for Ben-Gurion Airport. Rozanov supposed they would bury him on the Mount of Olives, next to the grave of his son. He didn’t really much care. He cared only that Allon was no longer among the living.

He opened the bottom drawer of his desk. It contained a bottle, a glass, and a packet of Dunhills, a taste for which he had acquired while working in London before the collapse of the Soviet Union—the great catastrophe, as Rozanov referred to it. He had touched neither alcohol nor tobacco in ten months. Now he poured himself a generous measure of vodka and tapped loose one of the Dunhills. Something made him hesitate before lighting it. He reached for the phone again, stopped, and inserted a DVD into his computer instead. The disk whirred; Brompton Road appeared on his screen. He watched it all from the beginning. Then he watched the man running headlong toward the white car. As the image turned to hash, Alexei Rozanov smiled a second time. “The fool,” he said softly, and he struck a match.