The Heist

by Daniel Silva

Jihan smiled. “Ingrid came to see me a few times,” she said, “but not you. They refused to tell me where you were.”

  “I’m afraid I had other business to attend to.”

  “Another operation?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  She filled their cups with coffee. “Eventually,” she resumed, “they allowed Ingrid and me to take a trip together. We stayed in a hotel on the Golan Heights. At night, we could hear the shelling and the air-strikes on the other side of the border. All I could think about is how many people were being killed each time the sky filled with light.”

  To that, Gabriel offered no reply.

  “I read in the newspapers this morning that the Americans are reconsidering military strikes against the regime.”

  “I read the same thing.”

  “Do you think he’ll do it this time?”

  “Attack the regime?”

  She nodded her head. Gabriel didn’t have the heart to tell her the truth, so he told her one last falsehood instead.

  “Yes,” he said. “I think they will.”

  “And will the regime fall if the Americans attack it?”

  “It might.”

  “If it did,” she said after a moment, “I would go back to Syria and help rebuild the country.”

  “This is your home now.”

  “No,” she said. “This is the place where I hide from butchers. But Hama will always be my home.”

  A sudden gust of wind blew a lock of her newly lightened hair across her face. She brushed it away and looked across the meadow, toward the massif. Its base was in deep shadow, but the snow-capped peaks were rose-tinted with the setting sun.

  “I love my mountain,” she said suddenly. “It makes me feel safe. It makes me feel as though nothing can happen to me.”

  “Are you happy here?”

  “I have a new name, a new face, a new country. It is my fourth. That is what it means to be a Syrian.”

  “And a Jew,” said Gabriel.

  “But the Jews have a home now.” She raised her hand toward the meadow. “And I have this.”

  “Can you be happy here?”

  “Yes,” she answered after a long moment. “I think I can. But I did enjoy the time we spent together on the Attersee, especially the boat rides.”

  “So did I.”

  She smiled, then asked, “And what about you? Are you happy?”

  “I wish they hadn’t hurt you.”

  “But we beat them, didn’t we? At least for a little while.”

  “Yes, Jihan, we beat them.”

  The last light leaked from the mountain peaks, and evening fell like a curtain upon the valley.

  “There’s one thing you never told me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “How did you find me?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me.”

  “Is it a good story?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I think it is.”

  “How does it end?”

  He kissed her cheek and left her alone with her past.

  61

  LAKE COMO, ITALY

  GABRIEL AND CHIARA SPENT the next two nights at a small resort on the shores of the Interlaken and then departed Switzerland by the same route they had entered it. In the mountain passes, Gabriel received a secure text message from King Saul Boulevard instructing him to turn on the radio; and as they crossed the Italian border at Lugano, he learned that Kemel al-Farouk, deputy minister of foreign affairs, former officer of the Mukhabarat, friend and trusted adviser of the Syrian president, had been killed in a mysterious explosion in Damascus. It had been Uzi Navot’s operation, but in many respects it was the first killing of the Allon era. Somehow, he suspected it wouldn’t be the last.

  It was raining by the time they reached Como. Gabriel should have taken the autostrada down to Milan, but instead he followed the winding road above the lake until he arrived once more at the leaden gate of Jack Bradshaw’s villa. The gate was tightly closed; next to it was a sign stating the property was for sale. Gabriel sat there for a moment, hands atop the steering wheel, debating what to do. Then he rang General Ferrari in Rome, asked for the security code, and punched it into the keypad. A few seconds later, the gate swung open. Gabriel slipped the car into gear and headed down the drive.

  The door was locked, too. Gabriel quickly unbuttoned it with a thin metal tool he carried habitually in his wallet and led Chiara into the entrance hall. A heavy smell of disuse hung on the air, but the blood had been scrubbed from the marble floor. Chiara tried the light switch; the chandelier from which Jack Bradshaw had been hung burst into life. Gabriel closed the door and headed toward the great room.

  The walls had been stripped of artwork and freshly painted; some of the furniture had been removed to create the illusion of greater space. But not Bradshaw’s pretty antique writing desk. It stood in the same place where it had been before, though the two photographs of Bradshaw before the fall had been removed. His multiline telephone remained, covered in a fine layer of dust. Gabriel lifted the receiver to his ear. There was no dial tone. He returned it to its cradle and looked at Chiara.

  “Why are we here?” she asked.

  “Because it was here.”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “Maybe,” he conceded.

  In the days after Gabriel’s initial discovery, General Ferrari’s Art Squad had torn Jack Bradshaw’s villa to pieces looking for additional stolen paintings. It was unlikely a canvas measuring seven feet by eight feet had somehow escaped their notice. Even so, Gabriel wanted to have one final look for himself, if only to put his mind at ease. He had spent the last several months of his life in pursuit of the world’s most famous lost masterpiece. And thus far all he had to show for it was a few stolen paintings and a dead Syrian thug.

  And so, as the daylight faded that autumn afternoon, he searched the home of a man he had never met, with his pregnant wife at his side—room by room, closet by closet, cupboard by cupboard, drawer by drawer, crawl spaces, air ducts, the attic, the cellar. He searched the walls for newly spread plaster. He searched the floorboards for clean nail heads. He searched the gardens for freshly turned earth. Until finally, fatigued, frustrated, and smudged with dirt, he found himself standing again at Bradshaw’s writing desk. He lifted the telephone to his ear, but not surprisingly there was still no dial tone. Then he drew his BlackBerry from his coat pocket and dialed a number from memory. A few seconds later, a male voice answered in Italian.

  “This is Father Marco,” he said. “How can I help you?”

  62

  BRIENNO, ITALY

  THE CHURCH OF SAN GIOVANNI EVANGELISTA was small and white and set hard against the street. To the right stretched a wrought-iron fence, behind which was the small garden of the rectory. Father Marco was waiting at the gate when Gabriel and Chiara arrived. He was young, thirty-five at most, with a full head of neatly combed dark hair and a face that seemed eager to forgive all sins. “Welcome,” he said, shaking their hands in turn. “Please follow me.”

  He led them along the garden walk and into the kitchen of the rectory. It was a tidy space with whitewashed walls, a rough-hewn wooden table, and tins of food arrayed upon open shelving. The one luxury was an automatic espresso machine, which Father Marco used to produce three cups of coffee. “I remember the day you telephoned me,” he said, as he placed a coffee before Gabriel. “It was two days after Signor Bradshaw was killed, was it not?”

  “Yes,” said Gabriel. “And for some reason, you hung up on me twice before taking my call.”

  “Have you ever received a phone call from a man who was just brutally murdered, Signor Allon?” The priest sat down opposite Gabriel and spooned sugar into his coffee. “It was an unsettling experience, to say the least.”

  “It seemed you were in contact with him a great deal around the time of his death.”

  “Yes.”

  “Before and after.”

  “Judging from what I read in the newspap
ers,” the priest said, “I probably called the villa while he was hanging dead from the chandelier. It is a terrible image.”

  “Was he a parishioner here?”

  “Jack Bradshaw wasn’t a Catholic,” said the priest. “He was raised in the Church of England, but I’m not at all sure he was actually a believer.”

  “You were friends?”

  “I suppose we were. But mainly I acted as his confessor. Not in the true sense of the word,” the priest added quickly. “I couldn’t actually grant him absolution for his sins.”

  “He was troubled at the time of his death?”

  “Deeply.”

  “Did he tell you why?”

  “He said it had something to do with his business. He was a consultant of some sort.” The priest gave an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry, Signor Allon, but I’m not terribly sophisticated when it comes to matters of business and finance.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  The priest smiled again and stirred his coffee. “He used to sit where you’re seated now. He would bring a hamper of food and wine, and we would talk.”

  “About what?”

  “His past.”

  “How much did he tell you?”

  “Enough to know he was involved in secret work of some sort for his government. Something happened many years ago when he was in the Middle East. A woman was killed. I believe she was French.”

  “Her name was Nicole Devereaux.”

  The priest looked up sharply. “Did Signor Bradshaw tell you that?”

  Gabriel was tempted to answer in the affirmative but had no desire to lie to a man in a Roman collar and a cassock.

  “No,” he said. “I never met him.”

  “I think you would have liked him. He was very smart, worldly, funny. But he also carried a heavy burden of guilt about what happened to Nicole Devereaux.”

  “He told you about the affair?”

  The priest hesitated, then nodded. “Apparently, he loved her very much, and he never forgave himself for her death. He never married, never had children. In a way, he lived the life of a priest.” Father Marco glanced around the spare room and added, “But in much grander fashion, of course.”

  “You’ve been to the villa?”

  “Many times. It was very beautiful. But it didn’t say much about what Signor Bradshaw was really like.”

  “And what was he really like?”

  “Generous to a fault. He single-handedly kept this church going. He also gave freely to our schools, hospitals, and programs to feed and clothe the poor.” The priest smiled sadly. “And then there was our altarpiece.”

  Gabriel glanced at Chiara, who was picking absently at the surface of the table as though she weren’t listening. Then he looked at the young priest again and asked, “What about the altarpiece?”

  “It was stolen about a year ago. Signor Bradshaw spent a great deal of time trying to get it back for us. More time than the police,” the priest added. “I’m afraid our altarpiece had little artistic or monetary value.”

  “Was he ever able to find it?”

  “No,” said the priest. “So he replaced it with one from his personal collection.”

  “When did this happen?” asked Gabriel.

  “Sadly, it was a few days before his death.”

  “Where’s the altarpiece now?”

  “There,” said the priest, inclining his head to the right. “In the church.”

  They entered through a side door and hurried across the nave to the chancel. A stand of votive candles threw a flickering red light upon the niche containing a statue of Saint John, but the altarpiece was invisible in the gloom. Even so, Gabriel could see the dimensions were approximately correct. Then he heard the snap of a light switch, and in the sudden burst of illumination he saw a crucifixion in the manner of Guido Reni, competently executed but rather uninspired, not quite worth the seller’s premium. His heart gave a sideways lurch. Then, calmly, he looked at the priest and asked, “Do you have a ladder?”

  At a chemical supply company in an industrial quarter of Como, Gabriel purchased acetone, alcohol, distilled water, goggles, a glass beaker, and a protective mask. Next he stopped at an arts-and-crafts shop in the center of town where he picked up wooden dowels and a packet of cotton wool. By the time he returned to the church, Father Marco had located a twenty-foot ladder and had erected it in front of the painting. Gabriel quickly mixed a basic solution of solvent and, clutching a dowel and a wad of cotton wool, scaled the ladder. With Chiara and the priest watching from below, he opened a window at the center of the painting and saw an angel’s hand, heavily damaged, clutching a ribbon of white silk. Next he opened a second window, approximately a foot lower on the canvas and a few inches to the right, and saw the face of a woman exhausted by childbirth. The third window revealed yet another face—the face of a newborn child, a boy, illuminated by a heavenly light. Gabriel placed his fingertips gently to the canvas and, much to his surprise, began to weep uncontrollably. Then he closed his eyes tightly and gave a shout of joy that echoed through the empty church.

  The hand of an angel, a mother, a child . . .

  It was the Caravaggio.

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  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The Heist is a work of entertainment and should be read as nothing more. The names, characters, places, and incidents portrayed in the story are the product of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  There is indeed a Church of San Sebastiano in the sestiere of Dorsoduro—it was consecrated in 1562 and is considered one of the five great plague churches of Venice—and Veronese’s main altarpiece, Virgin Assumed with Saints, is accurately described. Visitors to the city will search in vain for the restoration firm owned by Francesco Tiepolo, nor will they find a certain Rabbi Zolli in the ancient Jewish ghetto. There are several small limestone apartment houses on Narkiss Street in Jerusalem, but to the best of my knowledge no one by the name of Gabriel Allon lives in any of them. The headquarters of the Israeli secret service is no longer located on King Saul Boulevard in Tel Aviv. I have chosen to keep the headquarters of my fictitious service there, in part, because I have always liked the name of the street.

  There are many fine antique shops and art galleries on rue de Miromesnil in Paris, but Antiquités Scientifiques is not one of them. Maurice Durand has now appeared in three of the Gabriel Allon novels, and yet he still does not exist. Neither does Pascal Rameau, his accomplice from the criminal underworld of Marseilles. The Carabinieri’s Division for the Defense of Cultural Patrimony, better known as the Art Squad, is in fact headquartered in a graceful palazzo on Rome’s Piazza di Sant’Ignazio. Its chief is the able Mariano Mossa, not the one-eyed Cesare Ferrari. Deepest apologies to the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh in Amsterdam for borrowing Sunflowers from its magnificent collection, but sometimes the best way to find a stolen masterpiece is to steal another one.

  There is no Church of San Giovanni Evangelista in Brienno, Italy. Therefore, Caravaggio’s glorious Nativity, stolen from Palermo’s Oratorio di San Lorenzo in October 1969, could not have been discovered hanging above its altar, disguised as a crucifixion in the manner of Guido Reni. The account of Caravaggio’s turbulent life contained in The Heist is wholly factual, though some may disagree with choices I made regarding the dates and details of certain events
, as they occurred four centuries ago and, as a result, are open to interpretation. Even now, the exact circumstances of Caravaggio’s death are shrouded in mystery. So, too, are the whereabouts of the Nativity. With each passing year, the chances of finding the large canvas intact grow more remote. The impact of its loss cannot be overstated. Caravaggio lived just thirty-nine years and left behind fewer than a hundred works that can be firmly attributed to his hand. The disappearance of even a single painting would leave a hole in the Western canon that can never be refilled.

  There is no Luxembourg-registered firm called LXR Investments, nor is there a private bank in Linz, Austria, known as Bank Weber AG. The banks of Austria were once among the most secretive in the world—more secretive, even, than the banks of Switzerland. But in May 2013, under pressure from the European Union and the United States, Austrian banks agreed to begin sharing information on their depositors with the tax authorities of other countries. For better or worse, institutions such as Bank Weber—family-owned boutique-style banks that cater to the very wealthy—are fast becoming a dying breed. At the time of this writing, Switzerland’s ledger of private banks had shrunk to just 148 institutions, with further consolidation and attrition expected to reduce that number even further in the future. Clearly, the days of the gnome seem numbered, as American and European governments engage in ever more aggressive measures to combat tax evasion.

  There was indeed a massacre in the Syrian city of Hama in 1982, and, using numerous sources, I have tried to render its horror accurately. The man who ordered the city’s destruction, and the murder of more than twenty thousand of its residents, was not the nameless dictator portrayed in The Heist. He was Hafez al-Assad, ruler of Syria from 1970 until his death in 2000, when his middle son, the London-educated Bashar, assumed control. There were some Middle East experts who mistook Bashar for a reformer. But in March 2011, when the so-called Arab Spring finally came to Syria, he responded with a savagery that included the use of poison gas against women and children. More than 150,000 people have been killed in the Syrian civil war, and another two million have been left homeless or have fled to neighboring countries, mainly Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey. The number of Syrians living as refugees is soon expected to surpass four million, which would make it the largest refugee population in the world. Such is the legacy of four and a half decades of Assad family rule. If the slaughter and dislocation continues apace, the Assads might one day be rulers of a land without people.