The Rembrandt Affair

by Daniel Silva

  “And the interview?”

  “I thought I’d lost any chance of getting it. But the opposite turned out to be true. Scott Fitzgerald was right about the rich, Mr. Allon. They are different from you and me. They want everything. And if they can’t have something, they want it more.”

  “And Martin wanted you?”

  “So it seemed.”

  “How did he pursue you?”

  “Quietly and persistently. He would call every couple of days, just to chat and swap insights. British politics. Bank of England monetary policy. The budget deficit in America.” She paused, then added, “Very sexy stuff.”

  “Nothing personal?”

  “Not then,” she said. “After about a month, he finally called me late one night and said a single word: Yes. I got on the next plane to Geneva and spent three days inside Martin’s bubble. Even for a jaded reporter like me, it was an intoxicating experience. When the piece ran, it was an earthquake. It was required reading for businessmen and politicians around the world. And it cemented my reputation as one of the top financial journalists in the world.”

  “Did Martin like it?”

  “At the time, I didn’t have a clue.”

  “No phone calls?”

  “Radio silence.” She paused. “I confess I was disappointed when I didn’t hear from him. I was curious to know what he thought of the article. Finally, two weeks after publication, he called again.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He said he wanted to celebrate the fact that he was the first businessman to survive the slashing pen of Zoe Reed. He invited me to dinner. He even suggested I bring a date.”

  “You accepted?”

  “Instantly. But I didn’t bring a date. Martin and I had dinner here in London at L’Autre Pied. Afterward, I let him take me back to his hotel. And then…” Her voice trailed off. “Then I let him take me to bed.”

  “No qualms about journalistic ethics? No guilt about sleeping with a married man?”

  “Of course I had qualms. In fact, I swore to myself it would never happen again.”

  “But it did.”

  “The very next afternoon.”

  “You began seeing him regularly after that?”

  She nodded.

  “Where?”

  “Anywhere but London. My face is far too recognizable here. We always met somewhere on the Continent, usually in Paris, sometimes in Geneva, and occasionally at his chalet in Gstaad.”

  “How do you communicate?”

  “The normal way, Mr. Allon. Martin’s communications are very secure.”

  “For good reason,” Gabriel said. “Any plans to see him in the future?”

  “After what you’ve just told me?” Zoe laughed. “Actually, I’m supposed to see him in Paris four days from now. A week after that, I’m scheduled to go to Geneva. That’s actually a work trip—Martin’s annual Christmas gala at Villa Elma. Each year three hundred very rich, very lucky people are allowed to spend a few hours inside Martin’s inner sanctum. The price of admission is a hundred-thousand-euro contribution to his One World foundation. Even then, he has to turn away hundreds of people each year. I go for free, of course. Martin enjoys bringing me to Villa Elma.” She paused, then added, “I’m not sure Monique feels the same way.”

  “She knows about you?”

  “I’ve always thought she must suspect something. Martin and Monique pretend to have the perfect relationship, but in reality their marriage is a sham. They reside under the same roof but for the most part lead completely separate lives.”

  “Has he ever discussed the possibility of leaving her for you?”

  “Surely you’re not as old-fashioned as that, Mr. Allon.” She frowned. “Being around Martin Landesmann is very exciting. Martin makes me happy. And when it’s over…”

  “He’ll go back to his life, and you’ll go back to yours?”

  “Isn’t that the way it always works?”

  “I suppose,” said Gabriel. “But it might not be so easy for you.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Because you’re in love with him.”

  Zoe’s cheeks turned vermilion. “Is it that obvious?” she asked quietly.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “And you still want to use me?”

  “Use you? No, Zoe, I have no intention of using you. But I would be honored if you would agree to join our endeavor as a full partner. I promise it will be the experience of a lifetime. And you’ll see things no other British reporter has seen before.”

  “Perhaps now might be a good time to tell me exactly what it is you want me to do, Mr. Allon.”

  “I need you to see Martin Landesmann at his apartment in Paris one more time. And I need you to do me a favor while you’re there.”

  IT WAS a few minutes after midnight when the Jaguar limousine bearing Zoe Reed and Graham Seymour eased away from the curb outside the Highgate safe house. Gabriel departed five minutes later, accompanied by Nigel Whitcombe. They headed south through the quiet streets of London, Whitcombe chattering with edgy excitement, Gabriel emitting little more than the occasional murmur of agreement. He climbed out of the car at Marble Arch and made his way on foot to an Office safe flat overlooking Hyde Park on Bayswater Road. Ari Shamron was waiting anxiously at the dining-room table, wreathed in a fog of cigarette smoke.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “We have our agent in place.”

  “How long do we have to get her ready?”

  “Three days.”

  Shamron smiled. “Then I suggest you get busy.”

  49

  HIGHGATE, LONDON

  It was an alarmingly short period of time, even for an intelligence service used to working under the pressure of a ticking clock. They would have just three days to turn a British investigative reporter into a professional spy. Three days to prepare her. Three days to train her in the basics of tradecraft. And three days to teach her how to perform a pair of critical procedures—one involving Martin Landesmann’s secure mobile phone, a Nokia N900, the other involving his Sony VAIO Z Series notebook computer.

  Their task was made even more difficult by Gabriel’s decision to leave Zoe’s work schedule unchanged, a step he took to avoid any disruption in her daily routine. It meant the team would have her for only a few hours each evening, and only after she had already put in an exhausting day at the office. Graham Seymour quietly voiced doubts as to whether she would be ready, as did the Americans, who were now following the affair closely. But Gabriel held firm. Zoe had a date with Martin in Paris in three days. Break that date, and Martin might become suspicious. Send her into Martin’s bed too many times with her head filled with secrets, and she might end up like Rafael Bloch.

  For his classroom, Gabriel chose the familiar surroundings of the Highgate safe house, though by the time Zoe arrived for her first session it no longer bore any resemblance to a private London club. Its walls were covered with maps, photographs, and diagrams, and its rooms were occupied by a large group of Israelis who seemed more like harried graduate students than accomplished intelligence operatives. They greeted the new arrival as though they had been expecting her for a long time, then crowded around the dining-room table for a quick takeaway curry. The warmth displayed by Gabriel’s team was genuine, even if the names they hid behind were not. Zoe gravitated naturally toward the tweedy, Oxbridge-educated Yossi, though she was clearly intrigued by an attractive woman with long dark hair who referred to herself as Rachel.

  The enormous operational constraints forced Gabriel to dispense with normal methods of training and design a true crash course in the basics of espionage. It began immediately after dinner when Zoe was placed on a conveyor belt of sorts that whisked her from room to room, briefing to briefing. They trained her in the basics of countersurveillance and impersonal communication. They taught her how to move in public and how to conceal emotion and fear. And they even gave her a few lessons in self-defense. “She’s naturall
y aggressive,” Rimona told Gabriel, a bag of frozen peas pressed to her swollen eye. “And she has a wicked left elbow.”

  She was a gifted pupil, but then they had expected nothing less. By the end of the first night, the team unanimously declared her an amazingly quick study—high praise, given the quality of past recruits. Blessed with the skills of an elite reporter, she was able to store, sort, and retrieve vast amounts of information with remarkable speed. Even Dina, who carried a database of terrorism in her brain, was impressed by Zoe’s power of recall. “She’s used to working under a deadline,” Dina said. “The harder we push, the better she reacts.”

  Her final stop each night was the small upstairs study. There, alone with Gabriel, she would repeatedly rehearse the procedures that were the central purpose for her recruitment. If successful, Gabriel promised, Martin’s world would be an open book. One mistake, he cautioned, and she would sink the entire operation and place herself in grave danger. She was to assume that the wolf was just outside the door waiting to catch her in the ultimate act of betrayal. To defeat him would require speed and near silence. Speed came easily; silence proved far more elusive. It was finally achieved late on the second night, when a recording of the session revealed nothing audible to the human ear.

  Zoe’s rapid training, however, was only one of Gabriel’s concerns. There were vehicles to rent, additional personnel to move into place, and a safe flat to acquire on the Right Bank of the river Seine, not far from the Hôtel de Ville. And given the high-profile involvement of the British, there were many high-profile meetings to attend. The Iran team from MI6 found its way to the planning table, as did representatives of the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence. Indeed, each time Gabriel entered Thames House, the crowd seemed larger. There were obvious risks to working in such close proximity to sister intelligence services—namely, that those same services were taking careful note of every operational tendency they were able to observe. Gabriel’s exposure was increased by the fact that he was living and working inside an MI5 safe house. Though Graham Seymour denied he was listening in on the preparations, Gabriel was confident that every word uttered by his team was being recorded and analyzed by MI5. But such was the price to be paid for British cooperation against Martin Landesmann. And for Zoe.

  Gabriel remained faithful to the original operational accord and grudgingly allowed Graham Seymour to handle Zoe’s surveillance. Over the objections of the lawyers, Seymour extended the zone of coverage to include Zoe’s telephone and computer inside the offices of the Financial Journal. The intercepts of her calls and electronic correspondence exposed no indiscretion or second thoughts of any kind. Nor did they reveal any undisclosed contact from one Martin Landesmann, chairman of Global Vision Investments of Geneva.

  On Zoe’s final night at the Highgate safe house, she seemed more focused than ever. And if she was at all frightened by what lay ahead, she gave no sign of it. She resolutely stepped onto Gabriel’s conveyor belt and was whisked one last time from room to room, briefing to briefing. Her night ended, as usual, in the upstairs study. Gabriel switched off the lights and listened carefully while she rehearsed for a final time.

  “Done,” she said. “How long did it take?”

  “Two minutes, fourteen seconds.”

  “That’s good?”

  “Very good.”

  “Did you hear anything?”

  “Not a sound.”

  “Are we finished?”

  “Not quite.” Gabriel switched on the lights and looked at her thoughtfully. “It’s not too late to change your mind, Zoe. We’ll find some other way of getting to him. And I promise that none of us will think any less of you.”

  “Yes, but I might.” She was silent for a moment. “You should know something about me, Mr. Allon. Once I’ve made a decision, I stick to it. I never break promises, and I hate to make mistakes.”

  “We share that affliction.”

  “I thought so.”

  Zoe picked up the rehearsal phone. “Any last-minute advice?”

  “My team has prepared you well, Zoe.”

  “Yes, they have.” She looked up at him. “But they’re not you.”

  Gabriel took the phone from her grasp. “Once you start, move quietly but quickly. Don’t creep around like a cat burglar. Visualize your actions before you take them. And don’t think about the bodyguards. We’ll worry about the bodyguards. All you have to worry about is Martin. Martin is your responsibility.”

  “I’m not sure I can pretend to be in love with him.”

  “Humans are natural liars. They mislead and dissemble hundreds of times each day without even realizing it. Martin Landesmann happens to be an extraordinary liar. But with your help, we can beat him at his own game. The mind is like a basin, Zoe. It can be filled and emptied at will. When you walk into his apartment tomorrow night, we don’t exist. Only Martin. You just have to be in love with him one more night.”

  “And after that?”

  “You go back to your life and pretend none of it ever happened.”

  “And what if that’s not possible?”

  “The mind is like a basin, Zoe. Pull the plug, and the memory drains away.”

  With that, Gabriel walked her downstairs and helped her into the back of an MI5 Rover. As usual, Zoe immediately switched on her mobile phone to conduct a bit of work during the short drive home to Hampstead. Because the device had spent a few minutes in the capable hands of Mordecai earlier that evening, the team now knew Zoe’s altitude, latitude, longitude, and the speed at which she was traveling. They were also able to hear everything she was saying to her MI5 minder and were able to monitor both ends of a call she placed to her editor in chief, Jason Turnbury. Within five minutes of the call’s termination, they had downloaded her e-mail, text messages, and several months’ worth of Internet activity. They also downloaded several dozen photographs, including one she snapped six months earlier of a shirtless Martin Landesmann sunning himself on the deck of his chalet in Gstaad.

  The presence of the photograph on Zoe’s telephone provoked a fierce debate among Gabriel’s team, which they conducted in a terse form of colloquial Hebrew no MI5 listener would ever be able to translate. Yaakov, a man with a complicated personal life of his own, moved for immediate termination of the entire operation. “There’s just one reason why a woman would keep a picture like that. She’s still in love with him. And if you send her into his apartment tomorrow night, she’ll sink us all.” But it was Dina—Dina of the much-broken heart—who talked Yaakov down from his ledge. “Sometimes a woman likes to stare at a man she hates just as much as one she loves. Zoe Reed hates Martin more than she’s ever hated anyone in her life. And she wants to bring him down just as much as we do.”

  Oddly enough, it was Zoe herself who settled the dispute an hour later, when Martin phoned from Geneva to say how much he was looking forward to seeing her in Paris. The call was brief; Zoe’s performance, exemplary. After severing the connection, she immediately dialed Highgate to report the call, then settled into bed for a few hours of sleep. As she switched off her bedside lamp, they overheard a single word that left little doubt about her true feelings for Martin Landesmann.

  “Bastard…”

  The following morning when Gabriel arrived at Thames House, it seemed the whole of Whitehall was waiting in the ninth-floor conference room. After enduring an hour of rigorous questioning, he was made to swear a blood oath that, if caught on French soil, he would say nothing of British or American involvement in the affair. Seeing no papers to sign, Gabriel raised his right hand, then slipped quickly out the door. Much to his surprise, Graham Seymour insisted on driving him to St. Pancras Station.

  “To what do I owe the honor?” Gabriel asked as the car pulled into Horseferry Road.

  “I wanted a word in private.”

  “About?”

  “Zoe’s mobile phone.” Seymour looked at Gabriel and frowned. “You signed an agreement to let us handle her surveillance and you v
iolated it the moment our backs were turned.”

  “Did you really think I was going to send her into Martin’s apartment without audio coverage?”

  “Just make sure you shut down the feed once she’s safely back on British soil. So far, we’ve managed to avoid shooting ourselves in the foot. I’d prefer to keep it that way.”

  “The best way to shoot ourselves in the foot would be to lose Zoe in Paris tomorrow night.”

  “But that’s not going to happen, is it, Gabriel?”

  “Not if we run the operation my way.”

  Seymour gazed out the window at the Thames. “I don’t have to remind you that a good many careers are in your hands, mine included. Do whatever you need to do to get Martin’s phone and computer. But make sure you bring our girl home in one piece.”

  “That’s the plan, Graham.”

  “Yes,” Seymour said distantly. “But you know what they say about the best laid schemes of mice and men. They sometimes go astray with disastrous results. And if there’s one thing Whitehall doesn’t like, it’s a disaster. Especially one that occurs in France.”

  “Would you like to come and personally supervise?”

  “As you well know, Gabriel, I’m forbidden by law from operating on foreign soil.”

  “How do you manage to gather any intelligence with all these rules?”

  “We’re not like you, Gabriel. We’re British. Rules make us happy.”

  50

  MAYFAIR, LONDON

  As with nearly every other aspect of Masterpiece, choosing the location of an operational command post was the source of tense negotiation. For reasons of both design and statute, the ops center at MI5 was deemed unsuitable for a foreign venture, even one as close as Paris. MI6 made a predictable play to stage the event at Vauxhall Cross—an offer summarily rejected by Graham Seymour, who was already fighting a losing battle to keep his glamorous rival out of what he regarded as his operation. Since the Israelis had no London operations center—at least not a declared one—that left only the Americans. Running the show from the CIA’s shop made sense for both political and technical reasons since American capabilities on British soil far exceeded those of the British themselves. Indeed, after Seymour’s last visit to the Agency’s colossal underground facility he had concluded that the Americans could run a world war from beneath Grosvenor Square with Whitehall none the wiser. “Who allowed them to build it?” the prime minister had asked. “You did, sir,” Seymour had replied.