by Tom Clancy
And then there was the final justification, the grand and undebatable one — art itself. For art transcended all. It transcended da Vinci as surely as it transcended Marc Elata. It transcended Picasso, it transcended Elata’s present employer and greatest patron, Gabriel Morgan. It endured and would endure, even if every work in this museum were burned tomorrow.
Elata shuddered and turned abruptly, afraid that he had somehow inadvertently shared his thoughts with the rest of the room. But he had not. The tourists continued to wander through like cows grazing in a field.
He glanced at his watch. Still another three hours to kill.
Elata had not come to Paris to prepare himself for another round of paintings. His job was quite different — Morgan had hired him to detect a forgery rather than produce one.
Elata had done this sort of thing before. He had examined a Giotto supposedly passed down from the Nazis, steering Morgan away because of a tint under one of the eyes — a careless trick in an otherwise competent job. He had stuck to his opinion despite the arguments of two academic authenticators; in the end, Morgan had listened to him and passed on the painting, though not without regret. The painting had subsequently surfaced in an Australian collection, where a fresh and rather destructive laboratory analysis of it had denounced it as a fake — a careless piece of priming gave it away.
From that point on, Morgan insisted on Elata viewing every important piece he bought. Or so Morgan claimed, though Elata suspected that he did not. But the fact that he said so increased the pressure; the forger turned authenticator feared greatly making a mistake. Morgan no doubt considered this as big an incentive as his sizable fees.
Morgan did not rely on psychology or money alone. He made sure his expert was supplied with the proper tools to aid his judgment. In this case, he had arranged for Elata to receive a small piece of paper containing a sketch and swatch of paint. The fact that this piece of paper — a letter by Picasso, exceedingly rare because it contained a description and rough sketch as well as a dab of paint — belonged not to Morgan but to the Musée Picasso was of no consequence to Elata’s conscience, though it necessitated certain physical arrangements, this trip to Paris the primary one.
Elata folded and unfolded his arms, moving through the Louvre gallery. He had hoped looking at the paintings would consume some of his nervous energy, but it was no use. He was due at the Musée Picasso at precisely 2:10; he did not wish to arrive early and inadvertently draw attention to himself, but he had difficulty throttling his energy. He was not a patient man. He could not pretend to be a patient man. As a painter he attacked, he sprinted, he moved at the speed of thought; it could be an asset in art, but in life it made for rising blood pressure and insatiable boredom. It took his attention from the de Vries sculpture of Mercury and Psyche as he passed down the steps and out through the halls into the courtyard and park, helplessly propelled by his surging adrenaline.
* * *
“Deux,” said the voice in her ear. Then it repeated itself in English for her benefit. “Two in position.”
Nessa Lear watched from across the street, her vision partly obscured by wandering crowds, as their subject continued through the Tuileries garden toward Avenue du Gl. Lemonier. The American was tall, and the dark, well-cut jacket he habitually wore over a gray T-shirt and acid-washed jeans made him easy to keep track of. The fact that he seemed not to know he was being followed or even suspect it made things even easier.
Of course, it was also possible he was not planning on doing anything worth being followed for. “Doigts,” the French teammates on her Interpol task force called him. “Fingers.” They had given the name to Monsieur Elata for the incredible adroitness and adaptability of his painting strokes, for they believed he was responsible for forgeries ranging from a Rembrandt sketch to an early Matisse study. But the American had never been positively linked to the works — many of which were not even positively identified as forgeries. Elata had arrived in Paris yesterday afternoon, and had so far done nothing any other tourist would have done. He had sped through D’Orsay in the day yesterday, and Notre Dame in the evening, just as he had rushed through the Louvre today. Assuming the French had no law demanding that museum visits be of a certain duration (they might), he had done nothing wrong.
“Un moment. Merde,” cursed one of the team members. Nessa leaned around a stopped truck and peered toward the park. Elata had stopped at a vendor and was buying a sandwich. The tail had to continue past. Nessa would have to take over.
She moved forward. She’d been on the job officially less than a week, not counting the skimpy orientation period, and so didn’t know much of Paris yet, but that made her seem like the perfect tourist; acting lost would not be difficult, and she wouldn’t have to work hard at mispronouncing her French.
* * *
Elata wolfed the jambon—actually, a ham with cheese on a small French roll — then walked down in the direction of the Jardin du Luxembourg. He still had more than two hours to kill. He thought of going up to Montmartre, but had been warned by Morgan, absolutely warned, not to go near the Feu Gallery, where he had deposited several works during his last visit some months before.
So what was he to do? He stopped for a moment in the park, rubbing the heel of his boot against the yellow pebbles. He gave his eye over to the forms and colors passing by him — thick weaves of wool and puffed nylons, blue wedges, and green tweed. It was warm for March, but still it was March; if it had been May perhaps, he might have feasted on the figures. But late winter dulled the forms; there was nothing to divert him.
After this was over — after Zurich, where there were sure to be more delays — he’d reward himself with a trip to Florence and perhaps Rome. He might take a few weeks and do some of his own work, play with a few sketches, before taking up the other projects he’d agreed to.
But how to kill these two hours?
He saw the Metro entrance ahead, and reached into his pocket for the carnet of tickets he had purchased upon arriving yesterday. Nothing like the subway for wasting time.
* * *
“Buggers,” Nessa muttered to herself. Then she raised her voice to read the name of the Metro station, making sure the microphone tacked below her collar could pick it up and broadcast it to her companions.
Plunging down the stairway, she broke into a trot trying to find her subject. Jairdain should be coming down the other side somewhere — she looked for him as she jostled the contents of her purse for a Metro ticket.
They’d foreseen this, talked about it, planned for it, and yet here she was, nearly falling to pieces.
Inside, the place was a maze. Left or right at the tunnel intersection? There were different lines traveling in cross directions.
Jairdain would take one, but which?
“Go right,” he said in her ear.
“Oui. Thank you.” Nessa turned and trotted onward, craning her neck upward, ducking around a small pack of Korean tourists. A man with a suit was walking about twenty meters ahead. Music filtered in from the platform beyond the access, then the soft rush of the rubber-wheeled train arriving.
“Damn,” she said, throwing herself into a run.
Too late. The rush had been of the train leaving, not arriving.
Nessa was so busy cursing herself she almost bumped into the tall, thin American standing in front of the advertisement for the Louvre at the end of the platform. He held his elbows in his palms like an X across his chest, and frowned at her severely as she recovered her balance.
* * *
Crisscrossing aimlessly on the subway lines, Elata arrived finally at Sully-Morland with only a half hour more to kill. He came up from the Metro and walked down the Rue de Birague, turning toward the Maison de Victor Hugo, the home of the famous author, which had been turned into a museum.
He glanced at his watch. Though less than five minutes had passed since he had emerged from the subway, fear paralyzed him — he was going to be late. He turned and began running, st
reaking across the Place des Vosges, dodging the strollers like a madman. He ran up Rue de Turenne, bolting through traffic. Elata ran every day at home, but rarely this hard; he reached the Musée Picasso with fifteen minutes to spare.
He was at the far end of the ground floor, studying the greens of Woman Reading when the fire alarm sounded. By then he had caught his breath. He walked down the steps deliberately, went straight as directed by the guards, down another flight, moved back, turned left, and found the steps.
A woman in her thirties pushed into him. Her strong perfume caressed his nose. He felt her push the envelope into his pocket; he slipped it into his breast pocket and continued to walk, once more following the guards’ directions.
There were sirens outside, police and fire trucks arriving, someone yelling that they had seen smoke in the basement, someone else swearing there was smoke in the back gallery of the first floor — both were correct, as it happened, though in neither case would the small devices emit enough agent to damage the museum or its treasures.
Elata ignored the rushing firemen and the crowd gathering on the sidewalk. A taxi was just reaching the curb. He pushed past two tourists who had queued for it, ignoring their protests as he threw open the door and jumped in. The taxi lurched away without pause; its driver knew already where he was to take his passenger.
* * *
Jairdain slammed his hands on the trunk of the car as Nessa reached the curb.
“J’suis dans la merde,” said the French Interpol agent.
Pierre ran up to him, immediately joining in the coarse denouncing of their fate.
“Calm down,” Nessa told them when she arrived.
“To have lost him here,” said Jairdain before cursing again.
“Easy now, lads,” she said. “Someone in the museum passed him something when the alarm sounded. We’ve just got to track it down.”
“Oui?” said Pierre. “Who?”
“There was a woman on the steps, two guards, and someone who looked like a tourist,” she told them. “We’ll hunt down the tourist first. She’s the only one likely to get away.”
Zurich, Switzerland
Gabriel Morgan had seen both great opportunities and great trials in his life, but the torture he faced presently must surely rank among the most acute. For here he was, in one of Zurich’s newest and finest restaurants — A, which might stand for America, or the beginning of the alphabet, or anything else one wished — and he could not, or should not, choose from any of the excellent entrees. Not American wild duck in a blueberry-tarragon sauce, which carried with it unadvertised hints of mustard and sherry. Not the exotic but somehow pleasing foie gras soup peppered with ostrich bits in sake with white bean coulis and red pepper tortillas. Not even the deceptively simple sole in vermouth, which was built from a beurre blanc that would have left Escoffier speechless.
Morgan could have none of these dishes. Or rather, he could have any of them, if he was prepared to pay the price. His intestines had plagued him intermittently over the past six or seven months; the doctors offered different theories and countless remedies, though their advice came down to the same thing: eat plainly. No cream sauces, no spices, no exotic meats. They would prefer that he stay out of restaurants entirely, but if he must go, he should order something simple—baked capon, with no spices, no sauce, no salt, no pepper, no skin. They might just as well have told him not to have sex.
Perhaps not, for he could exert enough willpower most days to limit his diet. His other appetites, however, were more difficult to curb, as the Mieser twins, sitting across from him at the table in A’s exclusive red room, would surely attest.
He glanced at the girls, who had already settled on what they would eat — salmon and turnip daube in a radish-mango sauce for Lucretia, who loved the cornichons that came with it; American Cajun-style blackened catfish for Minz, who hungered for all manner of heat. Lucretia met Morgan’s gaze with a smile that hinted his hunger might be easily satiated. Minz, always so competitive with her sister, reached her hand beneath the table and raked his leg gently with her fingernails.
Morgan liked to bring the girls here mostly for the scandalous effect they had on the natives who considered themselves daring enough to venture beyond the traditional German-inspired restaurants in the town’s exclusive residential sections. Besides their Italian actress mother, the twins’ ancestors included three different dukes and an uncrowned German prince. And while the exact content of their father’s extensive pharmaceutical holdings were the subject of much local rumor and debate, their own assets were hardly obscured by the sheer blouses they wore above only slightly more modest black skirts. Morgan returned to the menu. He could choose the planked salmon, which was relatively plain and had not upset his stomach in the past. But it bothered him considerably that, rather than being cooked on American northwest cedar, it was prepared on local pine. Whether that made a major difference in its taste, he could not say, but the knowledge that he was eating a dish flavored by ersatz wood reminded him that he was doomed to an existence removed from the real thing, perhaps forever. And the fact that he could not easily return to the States vexed him far more severely than serial indigestion.
Morgan put off the question of the main course to review the salad choices once more, hoping the diversion would take his mind off America. Switzerland was not a horrible prison, certainly, and he suspected that his fondness for the U.S. was rather like that of the fox for the unreachable grapes. His family had made its fortune here. While he had lived abroad most of his adult life, Morgan had been raised in Zurich not far from this very restaurant. His childhood had not been unpleasant, but it had been constrained; his parents were not rigid so much as antiseptic, if one excepted his father’s activities to enhance the family fortune. The feeling of constraint came over him like a cloud every time he returned to the city or even the country. He felt it in his mouth every time he formed a word in his native Swiss German — one reason he tried to avoid the language whenever possible.
But really, Zurich, with its tidy streets and marvelous guildhalls, its medieval facades and peerless banks, was the perfect setting for the family businesses. The Morgans had been dealers in art and antiquities for many generations, both in Europe and in America. While it was true that the World War and its aftermath had given the family incredible wealth, it was equally true that they had been both well off and well respected at the turn of the last century. It was then that the Morgans (their name at the time Molerrageneau) had first branched into things other than art and real estate — trains specifically, and from there electric generation and commercial transport.
Different forebears placed different emphasis on the parts of the empire, which itself waxed and waned, metamorphosing with the times. Morgan’s great-grandfather had taken the boldest leap when a packet of small Renoirs had come his way via South America; obviously authentic and obviously pilfered by the Nazis, the paintings had been placed at considerable profit with a client known to be outstandingly discreet and willing to pay in gold bars. From there, as his father liked to say, it was but a matter of addition, though a more objective viewer might have likened it to multiplication. Money from the art side of the family empire helped fund the purchase, and in one or two cases the establishment, of concerns that diversified the family holdings even further. Such business were, by necessity, prejudiced toward the future, balancing the necessary prejudice toward the past that the art dealings betrayed. Those prejudices were among the key principles the family had adhered to since they were Molerrageneaus, principles that included direct personal involvement by one and only one Morgan at the helm, discretion, and above all, boldness.
Which led the family’s present overseer to throw caution and the prospect of diarrhea to the winds when the waiter appeared — choosing the rabbit and ostrich ragout in a morel mustard sauce, along with the Potatoes Daphne and the vegetable of the night, which happened to be Peruvian asparagus in a caviar coulis.
Morgan ordered
for the twins, who nodded gratefully. He felt his stomach rumble, and had regrets as he handed the menu back to the waiter. But he was a Morgan; he would not turn back. As a final stubbornness — and a gesture at least as provocative to discerning neighbors as hosting the twins — he asked for a bottle of 1985 Latour, a Bourdeaux wine that though still comparatively young, would decidedly not go with any of the dishes.
“Ladies, I’ve got to take care of some business, but go right ahead and enjoy,” he said, leaning to accept light pecks and a squeeze of the thigh from Minz before heading toward the room beyond the bar where the lavatory was. En route he stopped to greet Frau Leber, who was looking particularly potted tonight. He did not know her dinner mate, introduced as a retired French general; Morgan nodded attentively and memorized the name — Ambrose Xavier — in case it might become of use.
In the men’s room, he locked the door, then leaned against it before removing the small alpha pager from his pocket. Morgan thumbed a hot-button combination on the miniature keyboard, activating the modem; within thirty seconds he had signed onto a wireless message network and initiated a transmission that launched him as an anonymous, encrypted user on the system — not an easy feat actually, and one that required a rather large program on not one but two different servers. Fortunately, placing the programs on the servers had been assisted greatly by Morgan’s ownership of the company. Morgan cared little for the exact mechanics of the program, though he had a rudimentary notion of how it worked. In every area but art he tended to focus exclusively on results. Even in art, it took a great deal to interest him.
The matter he had come to the rest room to check on, for example, interested him a great deal.
A line of messages to a Yahoo e-mail account appeared on his screen. Most were products of list-serves, purposely cluttering the account. Several were dummies posted at random to make things difficult for anyone who might be trying to pry into his business. (There were several candidates who might undertake such despicable activities, including three different agencies of the United States government and one international firm that was a continual source of difficulty.) He opened each message, lingering as if actually reading them. Finally, he reached the one he actually wanted.