Gabriel Allon 10 - The Rembrandt Affair

by Daniel Silva

  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 naturally 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 Hotel 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 violated 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.

  Having settled on the venue, there was the small matter of the invitees. As Seymour feared, the list of those wishing to attend quickly grew atrociously long--so long, in fact, he felt compelled to remind his brethren it was an intelligence operation they were staging, not a West End premiere. Moreover, since the operation was likely to produce material inappropriate for broad dissemination, it had to be conducted with more than the usual sensitivity. Other agencies would eventually be briefed on the haul, Seymour declared, but under no circumstances could they be present when it was obtained. The guest list would be limited to the three principals--the three members of a secret brotherhood who did the unpleasant chores no one else was willing to do and worried about the consequences later.

  Though the precise location of the CIA's London ops center was a carefully guarded secret, Graham Seymour knew with considerable certainty that it was located some forty feet beneath the southwest corner of Grosvenor Square. He had always been somewhat amused by this, since on any given day several hundred anxious visa applicants were queued overhead, including the occasional jihadi bent on attacking the American homeland. Because the facility did not officially exist, it had no official name. Those in the know, however, referred to it as the annex and nothing else. Its centerpiece was an amphitheater-like control room dominated by several large video screens capable of projecting images securely from almost anywhere on the planet. Directly adjacent was a glass-enclosed soundproof meeting room known affectionately as the fishbowl, along with a dozen gray cubicles reserved for the alphabet soup of American agencies involved in counterterrorism and intelligence collection. Even Graham Seymour, whose primary task remained counterespionage, could scarcely remember them all. The American security establishment, he thought, was much like American automobiles--large and flashy but ultimately inefficient.

  It was a few minutes after six p.m. by the time Seymour finally gained admittance to the annex. Adrian Carter was seated in his usual chair on the back deck of the control room with Ari Shamron perched at his right, looking as though he were already in the throes of a full-blown nicotine fit. Seymour settled into his usual spot at Carter's left and fixed his gaze on the video screens. In the center of the display was a static CCTV image of the exterior of the Financial Journal, workplace of their soon-to-be agent in place, Zoe Reed.

  Unlike her colleagues at the Journal, Zoe's day had been the subject of close scrutiny by the intelligence services of three nations. They knew that it had begun badly with a twenty-minute delay on the dreaded Northern Line tube. They knew she arrived for work at 9:45 looking deeply annoyed, that she lunched with a source at a quaint bistro near St. Paul's, and that she ducked into a Boots pharmacy on the way back to work to pick up a few personal items, which they were never able to identify. They also knew she had been forced to endure several unpleasant hours with a Journal lawyer because of a threatened libel suit stemming from her Empire Aerospace expose. And that she was then dragooned into Jason Turnbury's office for yet another lecture about her expenses, which were even higher than the previous month.

  Zoe finally emerged from Journal headquarters at 6:15, a few minutes later than Gabriel had hoped, and hailed a taxi. By no accident, one pulled to the curb immediately and ferried her at inordinate speed to St. Pancras. She navigated passport control in record time and headed to the boarding platform, where she was recognized by a lecherous City banker who proclaimed himself her biggest fan.

  Zoe feared the man would be seated near her on the train but was relieved when her traveling companion turned out to be the quiet, dark-haired girl from Highgate who called herself Sally. Four other members of the team were also aboard Zoe's carriage, including an elfin figure with wispy hair she knew as Max and the tweedy Englishman who called himself David. Neither bothered to inform the ops center at Grosvenor Square that Zoe had made her train. CCTV did it for them.

  "So far, so good," said Shamron, his gaze fastened on the video screens. "All we need now is our leading man."

  BUT EVEN as Shamron uttered those words, the three spymasters already knew that Martin Landesmann was running alarmingly behind schedule. After starting his day with an hour-long scull across the flat waters of Lake Geneva, he boarded his private jet along with several top aides for the short hop to Vienna. There he visited the offices of a large Austrian chemical concern, emerging at three in the afternoon into a light snow. At which point, the intelligence gods decided to throw a spanner in the works. Because in the time it took Landesmann and his entourage to reach Schwechat Airport, the light snowfall had turned into a full-fledged Austrian blizzard.

  For the next two hours, Saint Martin sat with monastic serenity in the VIP lounge of Vienna Aircraft Services while his entourage worked feverishly to obtain a departure slot. All available weather data pointed to a long delay or perhaps even airport closure. But by some miracle, Martin's jet received the only clearance that night and by half past five was Paris bound. In accordance with Gabriel's standing order, no photographs were snapped as Martin and his entourage deplaned at Le Bourget and filed into a waiting convoy of black S-Class Mercedes sedans. Three of the cars headed to the Hotel de Crillon, one to the graceful cream-colored apartment house on the Ile Saint-Louis.

  For Gabriel Allon, standing in the window of the safe flat directly across the
river Seine, the arrival of Martin Landesmann was a momentous occasion since it represented the first time he saw his quarry in the flesh. Martin emerged from the back of his car, a smart leather computer bag in one hand, and slipped unaccompanied through the entrance of the building. Martin the man of the people, thought Gabriel. Martin who was a few hours away from being an open book. Like nearly all his public appearances, it had been brief, though the impression it left was indelible. Even Gabriel could not help but feel a certain professional admiration for the completeness of Martin's cover.

  Gabriel raised his night-vision binoculars to his eyes and surveyed the battlefield. Yaakov was in a Peugeot sedan parked along the river, Oded was in a Renault hatchback wedged into the narrow street at the side of Martin's building, and Mordecai was in a Ford van parked near the foot of the Pont Marie. All three would maintain a sleepless vigil for the duration of the evening, as would the three men in the black S-Class Mercedes parked outside 21 Quai de Bourbon. One was Henri Cassin, Martin's usual driver in Paris. The other two were officially licensed bodyguards employed by Zentrum Security. Just then, Gabriel heard a sharp crackle of static. Lowering his binoculars, he turned to Chiara, who was hunched over a laptop computer monitoring the live audio stream from Zoe's mobile phone.

  "Is there a problem?"

  Chiara shook her head. "It just sounds like the train is passing through a tunnel."

  "Where is she?"

  "Less than a kilometer north of the station."

  Gabriel turned toward the window again and raised his binoculars. Martin was now standing at the edge of his rooftop terrace, his gaze fixed on the river, his Nokia phone pressed to his ear. A few seconds later, Gabriel heard a two-note ring emanating from Chiara's computer, followed by Zoe's voice.