Gabriel Allon 10 - The Rembrandt Affair

by Daniel Silva

  There was Yossi Gavish, a tweedy, Oxford-educated analyst from Research, and Yaakov Rossman, a pockmarked former officer from Shabak's Arab Affairs Department who was now running agents into Syria. There was Dina Sarid, a terrorism specialist from History who seemed to carry the grief of her work wherever she went, and Rimona Stern, a former military intelligence officer who happened to be Shamron's niece by marriage and was now assigned to the Office's special Iran task force. There were Mordecai and Oded, a pair of all-purpose fieldhands, and two computer sleuths from Technical of whom it was said no database or server in the world was safe. And there was Eli Lavon, who had flown in from Amsterdam the previous evening after turning over the Lena Herzfeld watch to a local security team.

  Within the corridors and conference rooms of King Saul Boulevard, these men and women were known by the code name Barak--the Hebrew word for lightning--because of their ability to gather and strike quickly. They had operated together, often under conditions of immense stress, on secret battlefields from Moscow to the Caribbean. But one member of the team was not present. Gabriel looked at Yossi and asked, "Where's Mikhail?"

  "He was on a leave of absence."

  "Where is he now?"

  "Standing right behind you," said a voice at Gabriel's back.

  Gabriel turned around. Propped against the jamb was a lanky figure with eyes the color of glacial ice and a fine-boned, bloodless face. Born in Moscow to a pair of dissident scientists, Mikhail Abramov had come to Israel as a teenager within weeks of the Soviet Union's collapse. Once described by Shamron as "Gabriel without a conscience," Mikhail had joined the Office after serving in the Sayeret Matkal special forces, where he had assassinated several of the top terrorist masterminds of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. But he would forever be linked to Gabriel and Chiara by the terrifying hours they had spent together in the hands of Ivan Kharkov in a birch forest outside Moscow.

  "I thought you were supposed to be in Cornwall," Mikhail said.

  "I got a little stir-crazy."

  "So I hear."

  "Are you up for this?"

  Mikhail shrugged. "No problem."

  Mikhail took his usual seat in the back left corner while Gabriel surveyed the four walls. They were papered over with surveillance photos, street maps, and watch reports--all corresponding to the eleven names Gabriel had written on the chalk-board the previous summer. Eleven names of eleven former KGB agents, all of whom had been killed by Gabriel and Mikhail. Now Gabriel wiped the names from the board with the same ease he had wiped the Russians from the face of the earth and in their place adhered an enlarged photograph of Martin Landesmann. Then he settled atop a metal stool and told his team a story.

  It was a story of greed, dispossession, and death spanning more than half a century and stretching from Amsterdam to Zurich to Buenos Aires and back to the graceful shores of Lake Geneva. It featured a long-hidden portrait by Rembrandt, a twice-stolen fortune in looted Holocaust assets, and a man known to all the world as Saint Martin who was anything but. Like a painting, said Gabriel, Saint Martin was merely a clever illusion. Beneath the shimmering varnish and immaculate brushwork of his surface were base layers of shadows and lies. And perhaps there was an entire hidden work waiting to be brought to the surface. They were going to attack Saint Martin by focusing on his lies. Where there was one, Gabriel said, there would be others. They were like loose threads at the edge of an otherwise undamaged canvas. Pull on the right one, Gabriel promised, and Saint Martin's world would fall to pieces.

  43

  KING SAUL BOULEVARD, TEL AVIV

  They divided his life in half, which Martin, had he known of their efforts, would surely have found appropriate. Dina, Rimona, Mordecai, and Chiara were given responsibility for his highly guarded personal life and his philanthropic work while the rest of the team took on the Herculean task of deconstructing his far-flung financial empire. Their goal was to find evidence that Saint Martin knew his astonishing wealth had been built upon a great crime. Eli Lavon, a battle-scarred veteran of many such investigations, privately despaired of their chances for success. The case against Landesmann, while compelling to a layman, was based largely on the fading memories of a few participants. Without original documentation from Bank Landesmann or an admission of guilt from Saint Martin himself, any allegations of wrongdoing might ultimately be impossible to prove. But as Gabriel reminded Lavon time and time again, he was not necessarily looking for legal proof, only a hammer that he might use to beat down the doors of Saint Martin's citadel.

  Gabriel's first priority, however, was to break open the doors of Uzi Navot's executive suite. Within hours of the team's formation, Navot had issued a collegial directive to all department heads instructing them to cooperate fully with its work. But the written directive was soon followed by a verbal one that had the effect of sending all requests for intelligence or resources to Navot's sparkling desk, where invariably they languished before receiving his necessary signature. Navot's personal demeanor only reinforced the notion of indifference. Those who witnessed his encounters with Gabriel described them as tense and abbreviated. And during his daily planning meetings, Navot referred to the investigation of Martin Landesmann only as "Gabriel's project." He even refused to assign the venture a proper code name. The message, while carefully encrypted, was clear to all those who heard it. The Landesmann case was a tin can Navot intended to kick down the road. As for Gabriel, yes, he was a legend, but he was yesterday's man. And anyone foolish enough to hitch his wagon to him would at some point feel Uzi's wrath.

  But as the work of the team quietly progressed, the siege slowly lifted. Gabriel's requests began clearing Navot's desk in a more timely fashion, and the two men were soon conferring in person on a regular basis. They were even spotted together in the executive dining room sharing a dietetic lunch of steamed chicken and wilted greens. Those fortunate few who were able to gain admittance to Gabriel's subterranean realm described the mood as one of palpable excitement. Those who labored there under Gabriel's unrelenting pressure might have described the atmosphere in another manner, but, as always, they kept their own counsel. Gabriel made few demands of his team other than loyalty and hard work, and they rewarded him with absolute discretion. They regarded themselves as a family--a boisterous, quarrelsome, and sometimes dysfunctional family--and outsiders were never privy to family secrets.

  The true nature of their project was known only to Navot and a handful of his most senior aides, though even a glance inside the team's cramped lair would have left very little to the imagination. Stretching the entire length of one wall was a complex diagram of Saint Martin's global business empire. At the top were the companies directly owned or controlled by Global Vision Investments of Geneva. Below that was a directory of firms owned by known subsidiaries of GVI, and farther down lay a substrata of enterprises held by corporate shells and offshore fronts.

  The diagram proved Alfonso Ramirez's contention that, for all Saint Martin's corporate piety, he was remorseless in pursuit of profit. There was a textile mill in Thailand that had been cited repeatedly for using slave labor, a chemical complex in Vietnam that had destroyed a nearby river, and a cargo vessel recycling center in Bangladesh that was regarded as one of the most fouled parcels of land on the planet. GVI also controlled a Brazilian agribusiness that was destroying several hundred acres of the Amazon rain forest on a daily basis, an African mining company that was turning a corner of Chad into a dust bowl, and a Korean offshore-drilling firm that had caused the worst environmental disaster in the history of the Sea of Japan. Even Yaakov, who had seen mankind at its worst, was stunned by the vast chasm between Landesmann's words and his deeds. "The word that leaps to mind is compartmentalized," said Yaakov. "Our Saint Martin makes Ari Shamron look one-dimensional."

  If Landesmann were troubled by the contradictions in his business affairs, it was not visible on the face he showed in public. For on the opposite wall of Room 456C there emerged a portrait of a righteous, enligh
tened man who had achieved much in life and was eager to give much in return. There was Martin the philanthropist, and Martin the mystic of corporate responsibility. Martin who gave medicine to the sick, Martin who brought water to the thirsty, and Martin who built shelter for the homeless, sometimes with his own hands. Martin at the side of prime ministers and presidents, and Martin cavorting in the company of famous actors and musicians. Martin discussing sustainable agriculture with the Prince of Wales, and Martin fretting about the threat of global warming with a former senator from America. There was Martin with his photogenic family: Monique, his beautiful French-born wife, and Alexander and Charlotte, their teenage children. Finally, there was Martin making his annual pilgrimage to the World Economic Forum at Davos, the one time each year when the oracle spoke for attribution. Were it not for Davos, Saint Martin's legion of devoted followers might have been forgiven for assuming that its prophet had taken a vow of silence.

  It would not have been possible to assemble so complete a picture of Martin in so short a period of time if not for the help of someone who had never even set foot in Room 456C. His name was Rafael Bloch, and his contribution was the treasure trove of files gathered during his long and ultimately fatal investigation into Martin Landesmann. Bloch had left behind many pieces of the puzzle. But it was Eli Lavon who unearthed the true prize, and Rimona Stern who helped decode it.

  Buried in an unlabeled tan folder were several pages of hand-written notes concerning Keppler Werk GmbH, a small metallurgy firm based in the former East German city of Magdeburg. Apparently, Landesmann had secretly purchased the company in 2002, then poured millions into transforming the once-dilapidated facility into a modern technological showpiece. It seemed that Keppler's assembly lines now manufactured some of the finest industrial-grade valves in Europe--valves it shipped to customers around the world. It was a list of those customers that raised alarm bells, for Keppler's distribution chain corresponded rather nicely to a global smuggling route well known to Office analysts. The network began in the industrial belt of Western Europe, snaked its way across the lands of the former Soviet Union, then looped through the shipping lanes of the Pacific Rim before finally reaching its terminus at the Islamic Republic of Iran.

  It was this discovery, made on the fourth day of the team's effort, that prompted Gabriel to announce that they had just discovered Martin's loose thread. Uzi Navot immediately christened the operation Masterpiece and headed to Kaplan Street in Jerusalem. The prime minister wanted details, and Navot finally had a critical one to share. Gabriel's project was no longer simply about a missing Rembrandt portrait and a pile of looted Holocaust assets. Martin Landesmann was in bed with the Iranians. And only God knew who else.

  THE NEXT EVENING, Martin Landesmann became the target of active, if distant, Office surveillance. The setting for this milestone was Montreal; the occasion was a charity gala at a downtown hotel for a cause Saint Martin supposedly held dear. The watchers took several photos of Landesmann as he arrived for the party--accompanied by Jonas Brunner, his personal security chief--and snapped several more as he departed in the same manner. When next they saw him he was stepping off his private business jet at Geneva International Airport and into the back of an armored Mercedes Maybach 62S limousine, which delivered him directly to Villa Elma, his palatial estate on the shores of Lake Geneva. Martin, they would soon discover, spent almost no time at GVI's headquarters on the Quai de Mont-Blanc. Villa Elma was his base of operations, the true nerve center of his vast empire, and the repository of Martin's many secrets.

  As the surveillance operation settled into place, it began to produce a steady stream of intelligence, most of it useless. The watchers took many pretty pictures of Martin and recorded the occasional snatch of long-range audio, but their efforts produced nothing resembling an actionable piece of information. Martin conducted conversations they could not hear with men they could not identify. It was, said Gabriel, like listening to a melody without words.

  The problem lay in the fact that, despite repeated efforts, Technical had been unable to penetrate GVI's well-fortified computer systems or to crack into Martin's ever-present mobile phone. Given no advance warning of Martin's hectic schedule, Gabriel's watchers were little more than a pack of hounds chasing a crafty fox. Only the flight plans filed by Martin's pilots betrayed his movements, but even those proved to be of little value. Ten days into the Landesmann watch, Gabriel announced that he never wanted to see another photo of Martin getting on or off an airplane. Indeed, Gabriel declared, he would be happy if he never saw Martin's face again. What he needed was a way inside Martin's world. A way to get his phone. A way to get his computer. And for that he needed an accomplice. Given Martin's daunting security, it would not be possible to create one out of whole cloth. Gabriel needed the help of someone close to Martin. He needed an agent in place.

  AFTER A WEEK of around-the-clock searching, the team found its first potential candidate while staking out Martin at his luxury penthouse apartment located at 21 Quai de Bourbon, on the northern edge of the Ile Saint-Louis in Paris. She was delivered to his door by way of a chauffeured Mercedes at five minutes past nine in the evening. Her hair was dark and cut fashionably short; her eyes were large and liquid and brimming with an obvious intelligence. The surveillance team judged her to be a self-assured woman and, after hearing her bid good night to her driver, British. She punched the code into the entry keypad as though she had performed the task many times before, then disappeared through the doorway. They saw her again two hours later admiring the view of the Seine from Martin's window with Martin at her back. The intimacy of their pose, combined with the fact that her torso was bare, left no doubt about the nature of their relationship.

  She departed at 8:15 the next morning. The watchers took several additional photos as she climbed into the back of a chauffeured Mercedes, then followed her to the Gare du Nord where she boarded the 9:13 Eurostar train to London. After three days of surveillance, Gabriel knew her name, her address, her telephone number, and the date of her birth. Most important, he knew where she worked.

  It was the last piece of information--the place of her employment--that caused Uzi Navot to immediately declare her "flagrantly unsuitable" for recruitment. Indeed, during the heated argument that followed, an exasperated Navot would once again say things he would later regret. Not only did he call into question Gabriel's judgment but his sanity as well. "Obviously, the Cornish wind has affected your brain," he snapped at one point. "We don't recruit people like her. We avoid them at all costs. Cross her off your list. Find someone else."

  In the face of Navot's tirade, Gabriel displayed a remarkable equanimity. He patiently refuted Navot's arguments, calmed Navot's fears, and reminded Navot of the formidable nature of Martin's many defenses. The woman they had first seen in Paris was the proverbial bird in the hand, he said. Release her to the wind, and it might be months before they found another candidate. Navot finally capitulated, as Gabriel had known he would. Given Martin's secret commercial ties to the Iranians, he was no longer a can that could be kicked down the road. Martin had to be dealt with and dealt with quickly.

  The global nature of Martin's sins, combined with the passport carried by the potential recruit, meant it was not possible for the Office to proceed alone. A partner was required, perhaps two for good measure. Navot issued the invitations; the British quickly agreed to act as host. Gabriel had one final request, and this time Navot did not object. One didn't bring a knife to a gunfight, Navot conceded. And one never went to war against a man like Martin Landesmann without Ari Shamron in his back pocket.

  44

  THE MARAIS, PARIS

  Many years earlier, Maurice Durand had stumbled across a newspaper article about the case of Christoph Meili, a private security guard who had the misfortune of being assigned to work at the Union Bank of Switzerland's headquarters on the Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich. While making his rounds on a January afternoon in 1997, the devoutly Christian father of two ente
red the bank's shredding room and discovered a pair of large rolling bins filled with old documents, including several ledgers detailing transactions conducted between UBS and Hitler's Germany. Meili found the presence of the material in the shredding room more than a little suspicious, since weeks earlier Swiss banks had been prohibited by federal law from destroying wartime documents. Sensing something was amiss, he stuffed two of the ledgers under his shirt and smuggled them to his modest home outside Zurich. The next morning, he handed the documents over to the Israeli Cultural Center, at which point his problems began.

  The head of the center quickly called a press conference to denounce UBS for its wanton destruction of records. UBS dismissed the shredding as a regrettable mistake and promptly laid blame at the feet of the bank's archivist. As for Christoph Meili, he was summarily fired from his job and soon became the target of a criminal investigation into whether he had violated Swiss bank-secrecy laws by stealing the wartime records. Meili was hailed around the world as a "document hero," but in his native land he was hounded by public denunciations and death threats. Much to Switzerland's shame, the security guard who acted on his conscience had to be granted political asylum by the U.S. Senate and was quietly resettled with his family in New York.

  At the time, Maurice Durand concluded that Meili's actions, while admirable and courageous, were ultimately foolhardy. Which made it all the more strange that Durand had now decided he had no choice but to embark on a similar path. Ironically, his motivations were identical to Meili's. Though Monsieur Durand was a career criminal who habitually violated two of God's most sacred commandments, he regarded himself as a deeply spiritual and honorable man who tried to operate by a certain code. That code would not allow him to ever accept payment for a painting stained in blood. Nor would it permit him to suppress the document he had discovered hidden inside. To do so would not only be a crime against history but make him an accessory after the fact to a mortal sin.