Gabriel Allon: Prince of Fire, the Messenger, the Secret Servant

by Daniel Silva

  “You are,” Gabriel said, “but you should also know that if I tell you the truth, your life will never be the same.”

  She poured more wine for herself and held the glass for a moment against her body without drinking from it. “Two years ago, there was a particularly vicious attack here in the Marais. A young Orthodox boy was set upon by a gang of North Africans as he was walking home from school. They set his hair on fire and carved a swastika into his forehead. He still bears the scar. We organized a demonstration to bring pressure on the French government to do something about the anti-Semitism. As we were marching in the place de la République, there was an anti-Israeli counter-demonstration. Do you know what they were shouting at us?”

  “Death to the Jews.”

  “And do you know what the French president said?”

  “There is no anti-Semitism in France.”

  “My life has never been the same since that day. Besides, as you might have surmised, I’m very good at keeping secrets. Tell me why you want my van Gogh, Monsieur Allon. Perhaps we can come to some accommodation.”

  THENEVIOTSURVEILLANCE van was parked at the edge of the Parc Royal. Uzi Navot rapped his knuckles twice on the one-way rear window and was immediately admitted. One neviot man was seated behind the wheel. The other was in the back, hunched over an electronic console with a pair of headphones over his ears.

  “What’s going on?” Navot asked.

  “Gabriel has her in his sights,” the neviot man said. “And now he’s going in for the kill.”

  Navot slipped on a pair of headsets and listened while Gabriel told Hannah Weinberg how he was going to use her van Gogh to track down the most dangerous man in the world.

  THE KEY WAS hidden in the top drawer of the writing desk in the library. She used it to unlock the door at the end of the unlit corridor. The room behind it was a child’s room. Hannah’s room, thought Gabriel, frozen in time. A four-poster bed with a lace canopy. Shelves stacked with stuffed animals and toys. A poster of an American heartthrob actor. And hanging above a French provincial dresser, shrouded in heavy shadow, a lost painting by Vincent van Gogh.

  GABRIEL MOVED SLOWLY forward and stood motionless before it, right hand on his chin, head tilted slightly to one side. Then he reached out and gently fingered the lavish brushstrokes. They were Vincent’s—Gabriel was sure of it. Vincent on fire. Vincent in love. The restorer calmly assessed his target. The painting appeared as though it had never been cleaned. It was covered with a fine layer of surface grime, and there were three horizontal cracks—a result, Gabriel suspected, of having been rolled too tightly by Isaac Weinberg the night before Jeudi Noir.

  “I suppose we should talk about the money,” Hannah said. “How much does Julian think it will fetch?”

  “In the neighborhood of eighty million. I’ve agreed to let him keep a ten-percent commission as compensation for his role in the operation. The remainder of the money will be immediately transferred to you.”

  “Seventy-two million dollars?”

  “Give or take a few million, of course.”

  “And when your operation is over?”

  “I’m going to get the painting back.”

  “How do you intend to do that?”

  “Leave that to me, Mademoiselle Weinberg.”

  “And when you return the painting to me, what happens to the seventy-two million? Give or take a few million, of course.”

  “You may keep any interest accrued. In addition, I will pay you a rental fee. How does five million dollars sound?”

  She smiled. “It sounds fine, but I have no intention of keeping the money for myself. I don’t want their money.”

  “Then what do you intend to do with it?”

  She told him.

  “I like the sound of that,” he said. “Do we have a deal, Mademoiselle Weinberg?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I believe we have a deal.”

  AFTER LEAVING Hannah Weinberg’s apartment Gabriel went to an Office safe flat near the Bois de Boulogne. They watched her for three days. Gabriel saw her only in surveillance photographs and heard her voice only in the recordings. Each evening he scoured the tapes for signs of betrayal or indiscretion but found only fidelity. On the night before she was to surrender the painting, he heard her sobbing softly and realized she was saying good-bye to Marguerite.

  Navot brought the painting the next morning, wrapped in an old quilt he had taken from Hannah’s apartment. Gabriel considered sending it back to Tel Aviv by courier, but in the end decided to carry it out of France himself. He removed it from the frame, then pried the canvas off the stretcher. As he rolled it carefully he thought of Isaac Weinberg the night before Jeudi Noir. This time, instead of being hidden beneath a floorboard, it was tucked securely into the false lining of Gabriel’s suitcase. Navot drove him to the Gare du Nord.

  “An agent from London Station will be waiting for you at Waterloo,” Navot said. “He’ll run you out to Heathrow. El Al is expecting you. They’ll make sure you have no problems with your baggage.”

  “Thanks, Uzi. You won’t be making my travel arrangements much longer.”

  “I’m not so sure about that.”

  “Things didn’t go well with Amos?”

  “He’s hard to read.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he needs a few days to think it over.”

  “You didn’t expect him to offer it to you on the spot, did you?”

  “I don’t know what I expected.”

  “Don’t worry, Uzi. You’ll get the job.”

  Navot pulled over to the side of the street a block from the station.

  “You’ll put in a good word for me at King Saul Boulevard, won’t you, Gabriel? Amos likes you.”

  “What gave you that impression?”

  “I could just tell,” he said. “Everyone likes you.”

  Gabriel climbed out, took his suitcase from the backseat, and disappeared into the station. Navot waited at the curb until five minutes after Gabriel’s scheduled departure, then pulled out into the traffic and drove away.

  THE APARTMENT WAS in darkness when Gabriel arrived. He switched on a halogen lamp and was relieved to see his studio was still intact. Chiara was sitting up in bed as he entered their room. Her hair was newly washed and drawn back from her face by a velvet elastic band. Gabriel removed it and loosened the buttons of her nightgown. The painting lay next to them as they made love. “You know,” she said, “most men just come home from Paris with an Hermès scarf and some perfume.”

  The telephone rang at midnight. Gabriel answered it before it could ring a second time. “I’ll be there tomorrow,” he said a moment later, then hung up the phone.

  “Who was that?” Chiara asked.

  “Adrian Carter.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He wants me to come to Washington right away.”

  “What’s in Washington?”

  “A girl,” said Gabriel. “Carter’s found the girl.”

  16.

  McLean, Virginia

  HOW WAS THE FLIGHT?”

  “Eternal.”

  “It’s the autumn jet-stream patterns,” Carter said pedantically. “It adds at least two hours to flights from Europe to America.”

  “Israel isn’t in Europe, Adrian. Israel is in the Middle East.”

  “Really?”

  “You can ask your director of intelligence. He’ll clear up the confusion for you.”

  Carter gave Gabriel a contemptuous look, then returned his eyes to the road. They were driving toward Washington along the Dulles Access Road in Carter’s battered Volvo. Carter was wearing a corduroy sport jacket with patches on the elbows. It reinforced his professorial image. All that was missing was the canvas book bag and the NPR coffee mug. He was driving well below the posted speed limit and making repeated glances into his rearview mirror.

  “Are we being followed?” Gabriel asked.

  “Traffic cops,” said Carter. “They
’re fanatical on this road. Any problems at passport control?”

  “None,” Gabriel said. “In fact, they seemed very happy to see me.”

  It was something Gabriel had never understood about America—the geniality of its border policemen. He’d always found something reassuring in the bored surliness of the Israelis who stamped passports at Ben-Gurion Airport. American customs agents were far too cordial.

  He looked out the window. They had left the Dulles Access Road and were driving now through McLean. He’d been to Virginia just once before, a brief visit to a CIA safe house deep in the horse country near Middleburg. He found McLean to be an archetypal American suburb, neat and prosperous but somehow lifeless. They skirted the downtown commercial district, then entered a residential section with large tract homes. The developments had names like Merrywood and Colonial Estates. A road sign floated toward them: GEORGE BUSH CENTER FOR INTELLIGENCE.

  “You’re not actually thinking about taking me into Headquarters, are you?”

  “Of course not,” Carter said. “We’re going into the District.”

  The District, Gabriel knew, was the way Washingtonians referred to their little village on the Potomac. They crossed a highway overpass and entered an area of rolling hills and dense woods. Gabriel, through the trees, glimpsed great houses overlooking the river.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Sarah Bancroft,” Carter replied. “Her father was a senior executive in the international division of Citibank. For the most part Sarah was raised in Europe. She’s comfortable abroad in a way that most Americans aren’t. She speaks languages. She knows which fork to use when.”

  “Education?”

  “She came back here for college. Did a bachelor’s in art history at Dartmouth, then a stretch at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. I take it you’re familiar with the Courtauld?”

  Gabriel nodded. It was one of the world’s most prestigious schools of art. Its graduates included an art dealer from St. James’s named Julian Isherwood.

  “After the Courtauld she did her doctorate at Harvard,” Carter said. “Now she’s a curator at the Phillips Collection in Washington. It’s a small museum near—”

  “I know the Phillips Collection, Adrian.”

  “Sorry,” Carter said earnestly.

  A large whitetail deer darted from the trees and crossed their path. Carter let his foot off the gas and watched the animal bound silently away through the darkening woods.

  “Who brought her to your attention?” Gabriel asked, but Carter made no response. He was hunched over the wheel now and scanning the trees along the edge of the road for more deer. “Where there’s one,” he said, “there’s usually another.”

  “Just like the terrorists,” Gabriel said. He repeated his question.

  “She applied to join us a few months after 9/11,” Carter said. “She’d just finished her Ph.D. She looked interesting on paper, so we brought her in and gave her to the psychiatrists in Personnel. They put her through the wringer and didn’t like what they saw. Too independent-minded, they said. Maybe even a bit too smart for her own good. When we turned her down, she landed at the Phillips.”

  “So you’re offering me one of your rejects?”

  “The word hardly applies to Sarah Bancroft.” Carter reached into the pocket of his corduroy blazer and handed Gabriel a photograph. Sarah Bancroft was a strikingly beautiful woman, with shoulder-length blond hair, wide cheekbones, and large eyes the color of a cloudless summer sky.

  “How old?”

  “Thirty-one.”

  “Why isn’t she married?”

  Carter hesitated a moment.

  “Why isn’t she married, Adrian?”

  “She had a boyfriend while she was at Harvard, a young lawyer named Ben Callahan. It ended badly.”

  “What happened to Ben?”

  “He boarded a flight to Los Angeles at Logan Airport on the morning of September 11, 2001.”

  Gabriel held out the photograph toward Carter. “Zizi’s not going to be interested in hiring someone touched by 9/11. You brought me here for nothing, Adrian.”

  Carter kept his hands on the wheel. “Ben Callahan was a college boyfriend, not a husband. Besides, Sarah never talks about him to anyone. We practically had to beat it out of her. She was afraid Ben’s death would follow her around for the rest of her life, that people would treat her like a widow at age twenty-six. She keeps it very much inside. We did some sniffing around for you this week. No one knows.”

  “Zizi’s security hounds are going to do more than sniff around, Adrian. And if they catch one whiff of 9/11, he’s going to run from her as fast as he can.”

  “Speaking of Zizi, his house is just ahead.”

  Carter slowed to negotiate a bend. A large brick-and-iron security gate appeared on their left. Beyond the gate a long paved drive rose to an enormous faux-chateau mansion overlooking the river. Gabriel looked away as they sped past.

  “Zizi will never find out about Ben,” Carter said.

  “Are you willing to bet Sarah’s life on that?”

  “Meet her, Gabriel. See what you think.”

  “I already know what I think. She’s perfect.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “If we make one mistake, Zizi’s going to drop her down a very deep hole. That’s the problem, Adrian.”

  THE SUDDENNESS with which they reached the center of Washington took Gabriel by surprise. One moment they were on a two-lane rural road at the edge of the Potomac gorge, the next they were crawling along Q Street through the Georgetown evening rush. Carter, playing the role of tour guide, pointed out the homes of the neighborhood’s most celebrated residents. Gabriel, head against the window, couldn’t summon the energy even to feign interest. They crossed a short bridge, guarded at each end by a pair of enormous tarnished buffalos, and entered the city’s diplomatic quarter. Just beyond Massachusetts Avenue, Carter pointed to a turreted redbrick structure on the left side of the street. “That’s the Phillips,” he said helpfully. Gabriel looked to his right and saw a bronze version of Mohandas Gandhi hiking across a tiny triangular park. Why Gandhi? he wondered. What did the ideals of the Mahatma have to do with this patch of American global power?

  Carter drove another block and parked in a restricted diplomatic zone outside a tired-looking Latin American embassy. He left the engine running and made no movement to indicate he intended to get out of the car. “This part of town is called Dupont Circle,” he said, still in tour guide mode. “It’s what passes for avant-garde in Washington.”

  An officer of the Secret Service Uniformed Division rapped his knuckle on Carter’s window and gestured for him to move along. Carter, eyes straight ahead, held his ID against the glass, and the officer walked back to his squad car. A moment later something caught Carter’s attention in the rearview mirror. “Here she comes,” he said.

  Gabriel looked out his window as Sarah Bancroft floated virtuously past, dressed in a long dark overcoat with a narrow waist. She held a leather briefcase in one hand and a cell phone in the other. Gabriel heard her voice briefly as she passed. Low, sophisticated, a trace of an English accent—a remnant, no doubt, of her time at the Courtauld and a childhood spent in international schools abroad.

  “What do you think?” asked Carter.

  “I’ll let you know in a minute.”

  She came to the corner of Q Street and 20th Street. On the opposite corner was an esplanade filled with sidewalk vendors and a pair of escalators leading to the Dupont Circle Metro station. The traffic light in Sarah’s direction was red. Without stopping she stepped from the curb and started across. When a taxi driver sounded his car horn in protest, she shot him a look that could melt ice and carried on with her conversation. Then she continued slowly across the intersection and stepped onto the down escalator. Gabriel watched with admiration as she sank slowly from view.

  “Do you have two more just like her?”

  Carter fished a mobile p
hone from his pocket and dialed. “We’re on,” he said. A moment later a large black Suburban rounded the corner and parked illegally on Q Street adjacent to the escalators. Five minutes after that Gabriel saw her again, this time rising slowly out of the depths of the Metro station. She was no longer speaking into her telephone, nor was she alone. Two of Carter’s agents were with her, a man and a woman, one on each arm, in case she had a sudden change of heart. The back door of the Suburban swung open, and Sarah Bancroft vanished from sight. Carter started the engine and headed back to Georgetown.

  17.

  Georgetown

  THE BLACK SUBURBAN CAME to a stop fifteen minutes later outside a large Federal-style town house on N Street. As Sarah mounted the curved redbrick steps, the door opened suddenly and a figure appeared in the shadows of the portico. He wore creaseless khaki trousers and a corduroy blazer with patches on the elbow. His gaze had a curious clinical detachment that reminded Sarah of the grief counselor she’d seen after Ben’s death. “I’m Carter,” he said, as if the thought had occurred to him suddenly. He didn’t say whether it was his first name or his last, only that it was genuine. “I don’t do funny names anymore,” he said. “I’m Headquarters now.”

  He smiled. It was an ersatz smile, like his brief ersatz handshake. He suggested she come inside and once again managed to leave the impression of sudden inspiration. “And you’re Sarah,” he informed her, as he conveyed her down the wide center hall. “Sarah Bancroft, a curator at the well-regarded Phillips Collection. Sarah Bancroft who courageously offered us her services after 9/11 but was turned away and told she wasn’t needed. How’s your father?”

  She was taken aback by the sudden change in course. “Do you know my father?”

  “Never met him actually. Works for Citicorp, doesn’t he?”

  “You know exactly who he works for. Why are you asking about my father?”

  “Where is he these days? London? Brussels? Hong Kong?”

  “Paris,” she said. “It’s his last post. He’s retiring next year.”