by Daniel Silva
But he could not wage war against his enemy without a body and a brain. The pain gradually receded, like the waters of a severe flood, but his thoughts remained a jumble. The operation was somewhere out there, he knew it, but its plotlines and central characters were lost in the fog of the concussion. He determined that vigorous exercise was in order, not physical but mental, so he played Shamron’s old memory games and, in his head, reread dense monographs on Titian, Bellini, Tintoretto, and Veronese. The effort fatigued him—it was exercise, after all—but slowly the operation came into sharper relief. Only the denouement eluded him. He saw a wealthy man, broken, exposed, and willing to do his bidding. But how would he maneuver the man to this place? Slowly, he reminded himself. Beware the fury of a patient man.
Pain disturbed his sleep, as did nightmares of tumbling downward through a maelstrom of masonry and glass and blood. Nevertheless, he woke early on the fourth morning to find his headache gone and his thoughts clear. Rising before Chiara and the children, he went into the kitchen and made coffee, which he drank while watching the news on television. Afterward, he crept into the bathroom and confronted his reflection in the mirror. The image in the glass was by any objective measure disturbing. The left side of the face was reasonably intact, but the right—the side that had been turned toward the full force of the blast—was another story entirely. The eye was blackened and swollen, and there were numerous small cuts and abrasions left by flying glass and debris. It was not the face of a chief, he thought; it was the face of an avenger. He filled the basin with scalding water and slowly, painfully, scraped a week’s growth from his chin and cheeks. Each stroke of the razor sent a charge of pain into the base of his spine, and a sneeze, wholly unexpected, left him doubled over for several seconds in agony.
Showered, he returned to the bedroom to find that Chiara had risen. He pulled on a pair of gabardine trousers and a dress shirt with only minimal pain, but the effort of tying his Oxford shoes nearly drove him to the sanctuary of his bed. Smiling tightly to conceal his discomfort, he went into the kitchen where Chiara was preparing a fresh pot of coffee.
“All better?” She handed him a cup of coffee and looked him up and down. “Please tell me you’re not thinking about going to King Saul Boulevard.”
In truth, he was. But the tone of Chiara’s voice led him to reconsider. “Actually,” he said, “I was hoping to spend some time with the children, and I wanted to look like a person again rather than a patient.”
“Good recovery,” said Chiara skeptically. Just then, there came a chirp of laughter from the nursery. She smiled and whispered, “And so it begins.”
He made a brave show of it. He helped Chiara dress the children, an activity that inflicted on him no small amount of pain, and supervised the chaotic food fight otherwise known as breakfast. He spent the remainder of the morning playing games, reading stories, watching developmental videos, and changing an endless parade of soiled diapers. Mainly, he wondered how Chiara managed to care for the children alone, day after day, without collapsing with exhaustion or losing her mind. Running one of the world’s most formidable intelligence services suddenly seemed a rather trivial pursuit by comparison.
Nap time was an oasis. Gabriel slept, too, and when he woke he went onto the terrace to warm his weary body in the Jerusalem sun. This time, however, he brought a stack of reading material—the five hundred pages of Jean-Luc Martel’s file, a copy of which he had carried out of France. Martel had been the target of on-and-off French interest for more than a decade. And yet, with the exception of two minor scrapes having to do with unpaid taxes, both of which were settled far from public view, his reputation remained beyond reproach. The most recent probe of his business empire had taken place two years earlier. It had been launched after a midlevel drug dealer offered to testify against Martel in exchange for a reduced prison sentence. In the end the case was closed for lack of evidence, though the chief investigating officer, a man with an unassailable character, retired early in protest. Perhaps not coincidentally, the drug dealer whose accusation started the probe was later found dead in his prison cell, his throat slashed.
The investigation produced reams of communications intercepts—some salacious, many prosaic, all insignificant—and several hundred surveillance photos. Rousseau sent along a sampling of the best. There was Jean-Luc Martel at the Cannes Film Festival, Jean-Luc Martel at the Biennale in Venice, Jean-Luc Martel in the front row at Fashion Week in New York, Jean-Luc Martel on his 142-foot motor yacht in the Mediterranean, Jean-Luc Martel on the rue de Rhône in Geneva, and Jean-Luc Martel at the gala grand opening of his new restaurant in Paris, which was a smash because, according to one estimate, he dropped a cool five million euros to make certain every French celebrity of note was in attendance, along with an American reality television star who was famous for being famous, and a pair of American hip-hop artists who had unkind things to say about France’s treatment of racial minorities.
In none of the photos was Martel alone; the woman was always with him. The unusually tall and long-limbed woman, with wide blue eyes and Nordic-blond hair that fell straight about her square shoulders. She was not French, but English—curious, for Martel was a public champion of all things Gallic. Her name meant nothing to Gabriel, but her flawless face was vaguely familiar. An ordinary Internet search produced more than four thousand highly professional images. Advertisements for clothing. For jewelry. For an exclusive line of wristwatches. For fragrance. For swimwear. For an Italian sports car of dubious reliability. But all that was in her past. She was now the nominal owner of a well-regarded art gallery in the Place de l’Ormeau in Saint-Tropez, against which the French authorities had found no fault. A further search of publicly available documents and news items revealed that she was an atrocious driver, had been arrested twice on minor drug charges, and had been involved in a string of questionable romantic entanglements—footballers, actors, a member of Parliament, an aging glam-rock star who had bedded every other fashion model in Britain. She had never been married, and had no children, parents, or siblings. She was, thought Gabriel, alone in the world.
In most of the French surveillance photographs, her gaze was averted, her face downcast. But in one, taken on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris, she was caught staring directly into the lens of the camera. It was this photograph that Gabriel showed to Uzi Navot late that evening, at the small table in Gabriel’s kitchen. It was approaching midnight; Navot, who had spent the better part of the last decade on one fad diet or another, was slowly devouring the remnants of Chiara’s dinner. He studied the photo carefully between bites. A former recruiter and runner of agents, he had a keen eye for talent.
“She’s trouble,” he said. “Avoid.”
“Think she knows where her famous boyfriend really gets his money?”
“A girl like that . . .” Navot shrugged his heavy shoulders. “She knows. They always know.”
“The gallery is in her name.”
“You’re thinking about getting rough with her?”
“It’s not my first choice, but one should never limit one’s options.”
“How do you intend to play it?”
Gabriel explained while Navot finished the last of the food.
“You’ll need a Russian arms dealer,” Navot said.
“I have one.”
“Is he married, or does he play the field?”
“Married,” said Gabriel. “Very married.”
“Which flavor?”
“A nice French girl.”
“Anyone I know?”
Gabriel gave no answer. Navot stared at the photograph of the beautiful, long-limbed woman. “A girl like that won’t come cheap,” he said. “You’re going to need money.”
“I know where we can get money, Uzi.” Gabriel smiled. “Lots of money.”
19
King Saul Boulevard, Tel Aviv
It would be another seventy-two hours before Jean-Luc Martel, hotelier, restaurateur, clothier, jeweler, a
nd international dealer of illicit narcotics, became the target of full-time Office surveillance, along with Olivia Watson, his not-quite wife. The delay had to do with their location, and the season of the year. Their location was the enchanted West Indian island of Saint Barthélemy, and the season was late winter, which meant there was not a rental villa or hotel room to be had in the entire resort. Under Gabriel’s unrelenting pressure, Travel finally managed to lay its hands on a mosquito-infested hut overlooking the salt marshes of Saline. Mordecai and Oded, a pair of all-purpose Office field hands, settled there soon after, accompanied by two female escort officers, both of whom spoke American English. The French contributed no personnel, despite the fact that, technically speaking, it was their soil. Paul Rousseau’s Alpha Group was in no condition to operate against anyone; it was still mourning its dead and searching for a new clandestine headquarters in Paris. And as far as the rest of official France was concerned—the various ministers, the heads of the intelligence and security services, the police and prosecutors—there was no operation.
The target of this nonexistent operation, however, had no difficulty in finding accommodation in Saint Barthélemy. He owned a large villa in the hills above the village of Saint-Jean, from which he could behold his luxury hotel, his boutique specializing in beachwear for women, and his restaurant, which he called Chez Olivia. The first batch of surveillance photos showed her stretched nude beside the pool at Martel’s villa. The next depicted her in various stages of undress. Gabriel advised the team to devote its energies to more than photography. He already knew how Olivia Watson looked; what he wanted was hard intelligence. He was rewarded with another photo, this one showing Martel in flagrante delicto with one of the salesgirls from his boutique. Gabriel tucked the picture away for safekeeping, though he was dubious of its potential impact. When a woman entered into a relationship with a Frenchman, especially one as good-looking as Jean-Luc Martel, infidelity was part of the bargain. He only wondered whether Olivia Watson played by the same set of rules.
They would remain on Saint Barthélemy for the next ten days, unaware of the fact that several thousand miles away, in an anonymous office block in Tel Aviv, their lives were under a sustained if quiet assault. Eli Lavon, a skilled financial investigator, burrowed into JLM Enterprises, which, for all its Frenchness, was headquartered just across the border in secretive Geneva. With the help of Unit 8200, Israel’s ultra-secret signals intelligence service, Lavon pondered JLM’s balance sheets and tax records at his leisure. They revealed that the company was highly profitable indeed. Abnormally so, in the opinion of Lavon, who had a well-trained eye for dirty money. He then analyzed the company unit by unit. The restaurants, the hotels, the nightclubs, the boutiques and jewelry shops. All were in the black, a rather remarkable run of good fortune during a period of sluggish overall economic growth. The same could be said for Galerie Olivia Watson in Saint-Tropez. Indeed, while the rest of the art world was struggling in the post–Great Recession market, Galerie Olivia Watson had sold more than two hundred million dollars’ worth of art during the past eighteen months alone.
“Calder, Pollock, Rothko, Basquiat, three works by Roy Lichtenstein, three more by de Kooning, a couple of Rauschenbergs, and more Warhols than I could count.”
“Very impressive,” said Gabriel.
“Especially when you consider the prices she’s getting. I compared them to sales at auction houses in New York and London.”
“And?”
“Not even close.”
“Maybe she’s a good negotiator,” said Gabriel.
“I can tell you one thing. She’s discreet. Nearly all the sales are totally private.”
“Were you able to find any shipping waybills?”
“As a matter of fact, I was.”
“And?”
“During the past six months, she’s shipped four paintings to the same address in the Geneva Freeport.”
Initially, Lavon conducted his probe from his office on the top floor. But once the hook had been set, he gathered up his files and migrated downward through the building, to the cramped subterranean chamber known as Room 456C. The rest of the old Barak team soon joined him. There was tall, balding Yossi Gavish, with his British-accented Hebrew and donnish air, and Rimona Stern, she of the sandstone-colored hair, childbearing hips, and acid tongue. Yaakov Rossman, the pockmarked former agent-runner who was now the chief of Special Ops, reclaimed his old spot at the communal table, next to the last chalkboard in all of King Saul Boulevard. Dina Sarid, the Office’s walking database of Palestinian and Islamic terrorism, seized her usual place in the far corner. On the blank wall above her desk she hung an enlargement of the last known photograph of Saladin, the surveillance shot taken in the Tri-Border Area of South America. The message to the others was unmistakable. Jean-Luc Martel and Olivia Watson were mere stepping-stones. The ultimate prize was Saladin.
Gabriel, with his aching back and ribs, required no such reminder. Occasionally, he poked his head in the door to check on the team’s progress, but for the most part he kept to the top floor and walked an administrative tightrope, a chief one minute, a field man and planner the next. Not since the days of Ari Shamron had a director general held the tiller of an operation so tightly. Even so, the rest of the Office’s daily business—the myriad of smaller ops, the recruitments in progress, the analysis and assessment of current threats—proceeded as normal, thanks to the presence of Uzi Navot just across the hall. This was the maiden voyage of their new partnership, and it went off without a hitch. Navot even accompanied Gabriel to a meeting with the prime minister, though unlike Gabriel he proved powerless to resist the kung pao chicken. “It’s the salt,” he confessed as they filed out of Kaplan Street. “I’d eat my shoe if it was fried in oil and coated with soy sauce.”
As Eli Lavon tunneled into the dubious hospitality conglomerate known as JLM Enterprises, Yossi Gavish and Rimona Stern focused their efforts on Jean-Luc Martel the man. The story of his humble beginnings had been told often. He did not hide from them; they were, like his mane of almost-black hair, part of his allure. As a child he had lived in a nothing village in the hills of Provence. It was the kind of place, he often recounted, through which the rich and beautiful passed on their way down to the sea. His father had laid tile, his mother had swept and mopped it. She was part Algerian, at least that was the rumor in the village. Jean-Luc’s father beat her often. He beat Jean-Luc, too. The father disappeared when Jean-Luc was seventeen. Some months later his body was discovered at the bottom of an isolated ravine, a few miles from the village. The skull was in ruins, blunt force trauma, probably a hammer. Inside French law enforcement, it was widely regarded as Jean-Luc Martel’s first murder.
In press interviews, Martel spoke often of the fact that he was a poor and disruptive student. University was not an option, so at eighteen he made his way to Marseilles, where he went to work waiting tables in a restaurant near the Old Port. He studied the business carefully—or so the story went—and scraped together enough money to open a restaurant of his own. In time, he opened a second, then a third. And thus an empire was born.
The five hundred pages of the French file, however, told a rather different version of Jean-Luc Martel’s time in Marseilles. It was true he worked for a brief time as a waiter, but the restaurant was no ordinary restaurant. It was a money-laundering operation run by Philippe Renard, a high-ranking figure in the French milieu who specialized in the importation and distribution of illegal narcotics. Renard took an instant liking to the handsome young man from the hills, especially after learning that Jean-Luc had killed his own father. Renard taught his young apprentice everything there was to know about the business. He introduced him to suppliers in North Africa and Turkey. He counseled him on how to manage rivalries with other gangs so as to avoid needless bloodshed and publicity. And he instructed him on how to use seemingly legitimate businesses to launder and conceal profits. Martel rewarded Renard’s trust by killing him the same way he kill
ed his father, with a hammer, and seizing control of his business.
Overnight, Jean-Luc Martel became one of the most important drug figures in France. But he was not content to remain just one among many; total domination of the trade was his goal. And so he built an army of streetwise killers, mainly Moroccans and Algerians, and unleashed them on his rivals. When the blood finally stopped flowing, Martel was the only one standing. His expansion in the drug trade coincided with his rise in the legitimate world. Each side of the business fueled the other. JLM Enterprises was a criminal undertaking from top to bottom, a giant front-loading washing machine that produced hundreds of millions of clean euros each year.
He was married once, briefly, to a beautiful actress who played small parts in forgettable films. During the divorce proceedings, she threatened to tell the police everything she knew about the true source of her husband’s income. An overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol was her fate. Afterward, he abstained from public romance for many months, which the press found endearing. The police weren’t as impressed. Quietly, they tried to link Martel to his wife’s death. The investigation turned up nothing.
When finally he emerged from his Blue Period, it was with Olivia Watson on his arm. She was thirty-three at the time, a member of that lost tribe of English expatriates who stumble into Provence and never seem to find their way home again. Too old for modeling, she was managing a small art gallery that sold minor works—“And that,” explained Rimona Stern, “is being charitable”—to the tourists who besieged the village each summer. With Martel’s financial help, she opened a gallery of her own. She also designed a line of beachwear and a collection of Provençal-style furnishings. Like the gallery, both bore her name.
