by Daniel Silva
“You know, Mrs. Kharkov, I really think it’s best we see the painting alone. I’ve always found Cassatt to be a painter of women for women. Most men don’t understand her.”
“I couldn’t agree more. And I’ll let you in on a little secret.”
“What’s that?”
"Ivan loathes her.”
In the hayloft of the barn, the four men standing before the video monitors moved for the first time in three minutes.
"Looks like Uncle John just saved our asses,” said Graham Seymour.
"His father would be very proud.”
“Ivan’s not the world’s most patient man. I suspect you’ll have five minutes with Elena at most.”
“I’d kill for five minutes.”
“Let’s hope there’s no killing today, Gabriel. Ivan’s the one with all the guns.”
The two women climbed the central staircase together and paused on the landing to admire a Madonna and Child.
"Is that actually a Veronese?” Elena asked.
“Depends on whom you ask. My uncle’s ancestors did the Grand Tour of Italy in the nineteenth century and came home with a boat-load of paintings. Some were quite lovely. Some of them were just copies made by lesser artists. I’ve always thought this one was among the best.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“The Cassatt is still in the nursery. My uncle thought you would enjoy seeing it in its original setting.”
Sarah took Elena carefully by the arm and led her down the hall. The key was resting on the woodwork above the door. Standing on tiptoe, Sarah removed it, then raised a finger to her lips in a gesture of mock conspiracy.
“Don’t tell anyone where we keep the key.”
Elena smiled. "It will be our little secret.”
Ivan’s starting to get restless.” “I can see that, Graham.”
"She’s burned three minutes already.”
"Yes, I can see that, too.”
“She should have done it on the staircase.”
“She knows what she’s doing.”
“I hope to God you’re right.”
So do I, thought Gabriel.
Elena entered the room first. Sarah closed the door halfway, then walked over to the window and pushed open the curtains. The golden light fell upon two matching beds, two matching dressers, two matching hand-painted toy chests, and Two Children on a Beach by Gabriel Allon. Elena covered her mouth with her hands and gasped.
“It’s glorious,” she said. “I must have it.”
Sarah allowed a silence to fall between them. She lowered herself onto the end of the bed nearest the window and, with her eyes cast downward toward the floor, absently ran her hand over the Winnie the Pooh spread. Seeing her reaction, Elena said, “My God, I’m so sorry. You must think I’m terribly spoiled.”
“Not at all, Mrs. Kharkov.” Sarah made a show of looking around the nursery. “I spent every summer in this room when I was a little girl. That painting was the first thing I saw in the morning and the last thing I saw at night before my mother switched off the lights. The house just won’t feel the same without it.”
“I can’t take it from you, then.”
“You must,” Sarah said. “My uncle has to sell it. Trust me, Mrs. Kharkov, if you don’t buy it, someone else will. I want it to go to someone who loves it as much as I do. Someone like you,” she added.
Elena turned her gaze from Sarah and looked at the painting once more. “I’d like to have a closer look at it before I make a final decision. Would you help me take it down from the wall, please?”
“Of course.”
Sarah rose to her feet and, passing before the window, glanced downward toward the meadow. Boothby and Ivan were still there, Boothby with his arm extended toward some landmark in the distance, Ivan with his patience clearly at an ebb. She walked over to the painting and, with Elena’s help, lifted it from its hooks and laid it flat upon the second bed. Elena then drew a magnifying glass and a small Maglite flashlight from her handbag. First she used the magnifying glass to examine the signature in the bottom left corner of the painting. Then she switched on the Maglite and played the beam over the surface. Her examination lasted three minutes. When it had ended, she switched off the Maglite and slipped it back into her handbag.
“This painting is an obvious forgery,” she said.
She regarded Sarah’s face carefully for a moment as if she realized Sarah was a forgery, too.
“Please tell me who you are, Miss Crawford.”
Sarah opened her mouth to respond, but before she could speak, the door swung open and Ivan appeared in the threshold, with Boothby at his shoulder. Ivan stared at Elena for a moment, then his gaze settled on Sarah.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
It was Elena who answered. “Nothing’s wrong, Ivan. Miss Crawford was just telling me how much the painting means to her and she became understandably emotional.”
“Perhaps they’ve had a change of heart.”
“No, Mr. Kharkov,” Sarah said. “I’m afraid we have no choice but to part with it. The painting belongs to your wife now—if she wants it, of course.”
“Well, Elena?” Ivan asked impatiently. “Do you want it or not?”
Elena ran her fingers over the faces of the children, then looked at Sarah. “It’s one of the most extraordinary Cassatts I’ve ever seen.” She turned around and looked at Ivan. “I must have it, my love. Please pay them whatever they ask.”
35
LONDON
Precisely how Ivan Kharkov had managed to slip past the vaunted watchers of MI5 was never determined to anyone’s satisfaction. There were recriminations and postmortems. Regrettable letters were inserted into personnel files. Demerits were handed out. Gabriel paid little attention to the fallout, for by then he was wrestling with weightier matters. By paying two and a half million dollars for a painting she knew to be a worthless forgery, Elena had clearly shown herself to be receptive to a second approach. Which was why Adrian Carter boarded his Gulfstream jet and came to London.
“Sounds as if you had an interesting afternoon in the Cotswolds, Gabriel. I’m only sorry I wasn’t there to see it. How did Sarah hold up when confronted with the monster in the flesh?”
“As one would expect. Sarah is very talented.”
They were seated together on Gabriel’s bench in St. James’s Park. Carter wore the traveling attire of the American businessman: blue blazer, blue button-down, tan chinos. His oxblood penny loafers were dull for want of polish. He needed a shave.
“How do you think Elena was able to tell the painting wasn’t real?”
“She owns several other Cassatts, which means she spends a great deal of time around them. She knows how they look, but, perhaps more important, how they feel. After enough time, one develops an instinct about these things, a certain sense of touch. Elena’s instincts must have told her that the painting was a forgery.”
“But did her instincts also tell her that Sarah Crawford was a forgery as well?”
“Without question.”
“Where’s the painting now?”
“Still at Havermore. Elena’s shippers are coming to collect it. She told Alistair Leach she intends to hang it in the children’s room at Villa Soleil.”
A group of Croatian schoolgirls approached the bench and, in halting English, asked for directions to Buckingham Palace. Carter pointed absently toward the west. When the girls were gone, he and Gabriel rose in unison and set out along the Horse Guards Road.
“I take it Saint-Tropez is now in your travel plans as well?”
“It’s not what it once was, Adrian, but it’s still the only place to be in August.”
“You can’t set up shop there without first getting your ticket punched by the French services. And, knowing the French, they’re going to want in on the fun. They’re understandably angry with Ivan. His weapons have spread a great deal of death and destruction in parts of Africa where the Tricolore used to fly and where the French still wie
ld considerable influence.”
“They can’t have in, Adrian. The circle of knowledge is already too wide on this operation for my comfort. And if it widens again, the chances of Ivan and the FSB getting wind of it increase substantially.”
“We’re back on speaking terms with the French, and your friend the president would like to keep it that way. Which means that you’re not to take any action on French soil that might bring yet another euro shit storm down upon our heads. We have to go on the record with the French, just the way we did with Graham Seymour and the Brits. Who knows? Perhaps something good might come of it. A new golden age in Franco-Israeli relations.”
“Let’s not get carried away,” Gabriel said. “The French aren’t likely to be pleased with my terms.”
“Let’s hear them.”
“Unlike the Brits, the French will be granted no formal role. In fact, it is my wish that they do nothing more than stay out of the way. That means shutting down any surveillance operations they might be running on Ivan. Saint-Tropez is a village, which means we’re going to be working in close proximity to Ivan and his security gorillas. If they see a bunch of French agents, alarm bells will go off.”
“What do you need from us?”
“Continued coverage of all of Ivan’s communications. Make sure someone is sitting on the account twenty-four hours a day—someone who can actually speak Russian. If Ivan calls Arkady Medvedev and tells him to put a watch on Elena’s tail, I would obviously need to know. And if Elena makes a reservation for lunch or dinner, I would need to know about that, too.”
“Message received. What else?”
“I’m thinking about giving Sarah Crawford a Russian-American boyfriend. I can do Russian-Israeli on short notice, but not Russian-American. ” Gabriel handed Carter an envelope. “He’ll need a full set of identification, of course, but he’ll also need a cover story that can stand up to the scrutiny of Ivan and his security service.”
They came to Great George Street. Carter paused in front of a newsstand and frowned at the morning papers. Osama bin Laden had released a new videotape, warning of a coming wave of attacks against the Crusaders and the Jews. It might have been dismissed by the professionals of Western intelligence as yet another empty threat had the statement not contained four critical words: the arrows of Allah.
“He’s promising the autumn is going to be bloody,” Carter said. “The fact that he was specific about the timing is noteworthy in itself. It’s almost as if he’s telling us there’s nothing we can do to stop it. On deep background, we’re telling the media that we see nothing new or unusual in the tape. Privately, we’re shitting bricks. The system is blinking red again, Gabriel. They’re overdue for another attack against an American target, and we know they want to hit us again before the president leaves office. Expert opinion is convinced this plot may be the one. All of which means you have a limited amount of time.”
“How limited?”
“End of August, I’d say. Then we raise the terror warning to red and go on war footing.”
“The moment you do, we lose any chance of getting to Elena.”
“Better to lose Elena than live through another 9/11. Or worse.”
They were walking toward the river along Great George Street. Gabriel looked to his right and saw the North Tower of Westminster Abbey aglow in the bright sunshine. The Caravaggio image flashed in his memory again: the man with a gun in hand, firing bullets into the face of a fallen terrorist. Carter had been standing a few yards away that morning, but now his thoughts were clearly focused on the unpleasant meeting he was about to conduct on the other side of the English Channel.
“You know, Gabriel, you get the easy job. All you have to do is convince Elena to betray her husband. I have to go hat in hand to the Frogs and beg them to give you and your team the run of the Riviera.”
“Be charming, Adrian. I hear the French like that.”
“Care to join me for the negotiations?”
“I’m not sure that’s a wise idea. We have a somewhat testy relationship. ”
“So I’ve heard.” Carter was silent for a moment. “Is there any chance of amending your demands to allow the French some sort of operational role?”
“None.”
“You have to give them something, Gabriel. They’re not going to agree otherwise.”
“Tell them they can cook for us. That’s the one thing they do well.”
“Be reasonable.”
Gabriel stopped walking. “Tell them that if we manage to block Ivan’s sale, we’ll be happy to make sure all the credit goes to the French president and his intelligence services.”
"You know something?” Carter said. “That might actually work.”
The conference convened in Paris two days later, at a gated government guesthouse off the Avenue Victor Hugo. Carter had pleaded with the French to keep the guest list short. They had not. The chief of the DST, the French internal security service, was there, along with his counterpart from the more glamorous DGSE, the French foreign intelligence service. There was a senior man from the Police Nationale and his overlord from the Ministry of the Interior. There was a mysterious figure from military intelligence and, in a troubling sign that politics might play a role in French decision making, there was the president’s national security adviser, who had to be dragged to the gathering against his will from his château in the Loire Valley. And then there were the nameless bureaucrats, functionaries, factotums, note-takers, and food tasters who came and went with hushed abandon. Each one, Carter knew, represented a potential leak. He recalled Gabriel’s warnings about an ever-widening circle of knowledge and wondered how long they had until Ivan learned of the plot against him.
The setting was intensely formal, the furnishings preposterously French. The talks themselves were conducted in a vast mirrored dining room, at a table the size of an aircraft carrier. Carter sat alone on one flank, behind a little brass nameplate that read THOMAS APPLEBY, FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION—a mere formality since he was known to the French and was held by them in considerable regard despite the many sins of his service. The opening notes were cordial, as Carter anticipated they would be. He raised a glass of rather good French wine to the renewal of Franco-American cooperation. He endured a rather tedious briefing about what Paris knew of Ivan’s activities in the former French colonies of sub-Saharan Africa. And he suffered through a rather odious lecture by the national security adviser over the failure of Washington to do anything about Ivan until now. He was tempted to lash back—tempted to chastise his newfound allies for pouring their own weapons into the most combustible corners of the planet—but he knew discretion was the better part of valor. And so he nodded at the appropriate times and conceded the appropriate points, all the while waiting for his opportunity to seize the initiative.
It came after dinner, when they retired to the cool of the garden for coffee and the inevitable cigarette. There were moments at any such gathering when the participants ceased to be citizens of their own land and instead banded together as only brothers of the secret world can do. This, Carter knew, was one of those moments. And so with only the faint murmur of distant traffic to disturb the stately silence, he quietly placed Gabriel’s demands before them—though Gabriel’s name, like Ivan’s and Elena’s, was not uttered in the insecurity of the open air. The French were appalled, of course, and insulted, which is the role the French play best. Carter cajoled and Carter pleaded. Carter flattered and Carter appealed to their better angels. And last, Carter played Gabriel’s trump card. It worked, just as Gabriel had known it would, and by dawn they had a draft agreement ready for signature. They called it the Treaty of Paris. Adrian Carter would later think of it as one of his finest hours.
