Page 115 of The Cellist

“He wants the woman.”

“The one you allowed to steal my money?”

“I didn’t know she was working for Allon.”

“You should have.”

With his penitential silence, Arkady conceded the point.

“Is there a deal to be made?”

“He says not. But I had the impression he might be prepared to be reasonable. Let me speak to him again. Face-to-face, this time.”

Volodya adopted a dead-eyed stare. “Thinking about crossing over to the other side? Selling our secrets to Allon and his friends at MI6 in exchange for a nice little cottage in the English countryside?”

“Of course not,” lied Arkady.

“Good. Because you’re not going anywhere.” Outside, the tarmac was suddenly ablaze with light. Volodya smiled. “Perhaps you should return to your seat now.”

Arkady started toward the door of the compartment.

“Aren’t you forgetting something, Arkady Sergeyevich?”

He stopped and turned around.

Volodya held out his hand. “Give me your phone.”

57

Massif de la Vanoise, France

The Russian president’s Ilyushin aircraft departed Chambéry Airport at 1:47 a.m., some thirty-two minutes later than scheduled. Gabriel asked Paul Rousseau whether anyone on board the plane had unexpectedly disembarked before takeoff. Rousseau put the question to Chambery’s tower staff, and the tower staff double-checked with the ground crew. The answer bounced back a few seconds later. There were no members of the Russian president’s traveling party on the tarmac, or anywhere else for that matter.

“Where are the helicopters?” asked Gabriel.

“Still at the airport.”

“I need one.”

“You’re not going to find her in the middle of the night. We’ll mount a search-and-rescue operation first thing in the morning.”

“She’ll be dead in the morning, Paul.”

Rousseau put the request to the senior Service de la Protection officer, and the SDLP man raised it with the helicopter pilots. All three volunteered.

“One is all I need,” said Gabriel.

“He’ll be there in about twenty minutes.”

Mikhail Abramov ran Gabriel up the winding road to Courchevel’s tiny airport. The Airbus Super Puma touched down at 2:14 a.m. Gabriel hurried across the tarmac and climbed aboard.

“Where should we start?” shouted the pilot.

Gabriel pointed to the southwest, toward the peaks of the Massif de la Vanoise.

When the snowmobile’s engine finally died, Isabel’s ears sang in the sudden silence—a persistent note, sweet and pure, like the sound Anna Rolfe produced when she laid her bow upon the strings of her Guarneri violin.

The next sound she heard was the crunch of Felix dropping into crisp snow. He loosened the nylon rope holding the tarpaulin in place and cut away the packing tape he had wrapped around the padded blanket. Isabel made two counterclockwise rotations and came to rest next to the sled. She tried to free herself, but it was no use. The snow had her in its grip.

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