The doctor seemed to sense his unease. “Your wife will be fine,” he said. Then, with a smile, he added, “I’m glad you’re not dead. We need you. And so do your children.”

The visits to the hospital were their only break from the long monotonous hours of bed rest and waiting. Restless with inactivity, Gabriel longed for a project. Chiara allowed him to pack her suitcase for the hospital, which consumed all of five minutes. Afterward, he went in search of something else to do. His quest led him into the nursery, where he stood for a long time before Chiara’s clouds, a hand pressed to his chin, his head tilted slightly to one side.

“Would you mind terribly,” he asked Chiara, “if I retouch them a bit?”

“What’s wrong with them?”

“They’re beautiful,” he said too hastily.

“But?”

“They’re a bit childlike.”

“They’re for children.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Grudgingly, she approved the commission, provided he use only child-safe paints and that the work be done within twenty-four hours. Gabriel hurried off to a nearby paint store with his bodyguards in tow and returned in short order with the necessary supplies. With a few strokes of a roller—an instrument he had never used before—he obliterated Chiara’s work beneath a fresh layer of pale blue paint. It remained too wet to work more that evening, so he rose early the next morning and swiftly decorated the wall in a bank of glowing Titianesque clouds. Lastly, he added a small child angel, a boy, who was peering downward over the edge of the highest cloud on the scene below. The figure was borrowed from Veronese’s Virgin and Child in Glory with Saints. With tears in his eyes and a trembling hand, Gabriel gave the angel the face of his son as it appeared on the night of his death. Then he signed his name and the date, and it was done.

Later that day the London Sunday Telegraph published an exclusive exposé linking Russia and its foreign intelligence service to the murder of the princess, the bombing on Brompton Road, the killing of four MI6 security personnel in West Cornwall, and the bloodbath in Crossmaglen, Northern Ireland. The operation, said the paper, was in reprisal for the revocation of lucrative Russian drilling rights in the North Sea and the defection of Madeline Hart, the Russian sleeper agent who had briefly shared Prime Minister Lancaster’s bed. Russia’s president had ordered it; Alexei Rozanov, the SVR officer recently found dead in Germany, had overseen its implementation. His primary operative had been Eamon Quinn, the Omagh bomber turned international mercenary. Quinn was now missing and was the target of a global manhunt.