Gabriel Allon 10 - The Rembrandt Affair

by Daniel Silva

  "Hang up. Count to sixty. Then go to work."

  The connection went dead as Zoe entered the kitchen. In the darkness, she could just make out the faint outline of the black Sony VAIO computer at the end of the island. Martin had left the computer on standby mode. Zoe immediately shut it down and inserted the flash drive into one of the USB ports. Then she picked up the Nokia again and stared at the screen, counting silently to herself.

  Twenty-five...twenty-six...twenty-seven...twenty-eight...

  AFTER SEVERING his connection to Zoe, Gabriel quickly informed the rest of the team via secure radio that the operation was now hot. Only Mordecai had a task to perform at that point, and it required merely throwing the power switch on the device resting on the passenger seat of the Ford van. Essentially, the apparatus was a cell tower in a suitcase, designed to deceive Martin's phone into thinking it was on his usual network when in reality it was on the Office's. Its signal, while tightly focused on the building at 21 Quai de Bourbon, would temporarily obliterate most cellular service on the Ile Saint-Louis. At that moment, any inconvenience to French telecom customers was the least of Gabriel's worries. He was standing in the window of the safe flat, gaze focused on the darkened windows of Martin Landesmann's bedroom, counting silently in his head.

  Fifty-seven...fifty-eight...fifty-nine...sixty...

  Now, Zoe. Now...

  AS IF ON CUE, Zoe began punching a number into Martin's phone. It was a number she had dialed hundreds of times in the Highgate safe house. A number she knew as well as her own. After entering the last digit, she pressed the call button and lifted the phone to her ear. A single ringtone sounded, followed by several sharp beeps. Zoe looked at the display screen. A dialogue box appeared, asking whether she wished to accept an over-the-air software update. She immediately pressed YES on the touch screen. A few seconds later, another message appeared: DOWNLOAD IN PROGRESS.

  Zoe placed the phone gently on the counter, then powered on the Sony notebook while holding down the F8 key. Rather than starting normally, the computer automatically took Zoe to the boot menu. She clicked on the option to enable boot logging, then instructed the computer to start up using the software contained on the flash drive. It did so without objection, and within a few seconds a box appeared on the screen, informing her that an upload was in progress. Because of its large size--every bit of data stored on Martin's hard drive--the upload would take one hour and fifteen minutes. Unfortunately, it was necessary to leave the flash drive in the USB port throughout the process, which meant Zoe would have to make a second trip to the kitchen to remove it when the task was complete.

  She dimmed the brightness on the computer screen and picked up Martin's mobile phone again. The "software update" was complete. All that was required now was rebooting, a simple matter of switching the phone off and on once. She did so, then quickly checked the list of recent calls. There was no evidence of the one call Zoe had placed. In fact, according to the directory, the last call made from the phone was at 10:18, when Martin had phoned Monique in Geneva. As for the last call received, it was the one that had come through while Martin was preparing dinner. Zoe looked at the number.

  Monique...

  Zoe returned the phone to standby mode and opened the refrigerator. On the top shelf was a one-liter bottle of Volvic. She removed it, closed the door gently, and headed into the dining room, staying just long enough to deposit Martin's phone. Returning to the bedroom, she found the door slightly ajar, just as she had left it. Martin was lying motionless on the bed, the pale skin of his torso aglow in the moonlight. She padded to her side of the bed and dropped her mobile phone into her handbag. Then she slipped beneath the satin sheets and looked at Martin. His eyes opened suddenly, and his expression appeared childlike no more.

  "I was beginning to get worried about you, Zoe. Where have you been?"

  THERE ARE MOMENTS in even the simplest of operations when time stops. Gabriel had experienced more such moments than most professional intelligence officers. And he certainly experienced one at 3:36 a.m. in Paris while waiting for Zoe Reed, special investigative correspondent of the venerable Financial Journal of London, to respond to her lover, Martin Landesmann. He did not tell London about the potential problem. He did not tell his team. Instead, he stood in the window of the safe flat, binoculars to his eyes, Chiara at his side, and did what every experienced fieldhand does at a time like that. He held his breath.

  The silence seemed to last an eternity. Later, when reviewing the recording, he would discover it was only three seconds. She began by complaining of a ferocious thirst, then playfully chastised Martin for hurling her clothing across the floor in his frenzy to undress her. And finally she suggested several things they might do now that they both happened to be awake at 3:36 in the morning.

  Somewhere inside Gabriel was an ordinary man who wanted desperately not to eavesdrop. Professionalism would not allow it. And so he stood in the window of the safe flat with his wife at his side and listened while Zoe Reed made love one final time to a man whom Gabriel had convinced her to hate. And he listened, too, one hour and fifteen minutes later, as Zoe rose from Martin's bed to retrieve the flash drive from Martin's computer--a flash drive that had beamed the contents of Martin's hard drive to a sturdy redbrick Victorian house in Highgate.

  Gabriel's partners in London would never hear the recordings from that night in Paris. They had no right. They would only know that Zoe Reed emerged from the apartment building on Ile Saint-Louis at 8:15 a.m. and that she climbed in the back of a chauffeured Mercedes-Benz with the name REED in the window. The car ferried her directly to the Gare du Nord, where she was once again waylaid by several panhandlers and drug addicts as she hurried across the ticket hall toward her waiting train. A dread-locked Ukrainian with a mud-caked leather jacket proved to be the most persistent of her suitors. He finally backed down when confronted by a man with short dark hair and pockmarks on his face.

  Not by coincidence, that same man was seated next to Zoe on the train. His forged New Zealand passport identified him as Leighton Smith, though his real name was Yaakov Rossman, one of four members of Gabriel's team who accompanied Zoe on her return to London. She passed most of the train ride reading the morning papers, and upon her arrival at St. Pancras was covertly returned to the custody of MI5. They drove her to work in an ersatz taxi and snapped several pictures as she disappeared through the entrance. As promised, Gabriel ordered the digital tap on Zoe's phone disconnected, and within minutes she vanished from the Office's global surveillance grid. Few members of the Masterpiece team seemed to notice. Because by then they were all listening to the voice of Martin Landesmann.

  53

  HIGHGATE, LONDON

  To some extent, computer networks and communications devices can be shielded from outside penetration. But if the attack occurs from the inside--or by gaining access to the devices themselves--there is little the target can do to defend himself. With but a few lines of well-crafted code, a mobile phone or laptop computer can be convinced to betray its owner's most closely guarded secrets--and continue betraying them for months or even years. The machines are perfect spies. They do not require money or validation or love. Their motives are beyond question, for they have none of their own. They are reliable, dependable, and willing to work extraordinarily long hours. They do not become depressed or drink too much. They do not have spouses who berate them or children who disappoint them. They do not become lonely or frightened. They do not burn out. Obsolescence is their only weakness. More often than not, they are discarded merely because something better comes along.

  The nature of the intelligence assault on Martin Landesmann, while breathtaking in scale, was routine in the world of twenty-first-century espionage. Gone were the days when the only option for eavesdropping on a target involved planting a battery-powered radio transmitter in his home or office. Now the targets willingly carried transmitters with them in the form of their own cellular phones and other mobile devices. Intellig
ence operatives didn't have to recharge weakening batteries because the targets did that themselves. Nor was it necessary for operatives to spend endless hours sitting in dreary listening posts since material acquired from a wi-fi device could be fed via the Internet to computers anywhere in the world.

  In the case of Operation Masterpiece, those computers were tucked away in a redbrick Victorian house located at the end of a hushed cul-de-sac in the Highgate section of London. After working around the clock preparing for the operation in Paris, Gabriel and his team now worked around the clock sorting and analyzing the immense haul. In the blink of an eye, the life of one of the world's most reclusive businessmen was now an open book. Indeed, as Uzi Navot would describe it to the prime minister during their weekly breakfast meeting, "Anywhere Martin goes, we go with him."

  They listened to his phone calls, they read his e-mail, they peered quietly over his shoulder while he surfed the Web. They negotiated deals with him, ate lunch with him, and went to cocktail receptions tucked in his breast pocket. They slept with him, bathed with him, exercised with him, and overheard a quarrel with Monique over his frequent trips to Paris. They accompanied him on a flying visit to Stockholm and were forced to endure an excruciating evening of Wagner with him. They knew his exact position on the planet at all times, and if he happened to be in motion, they knew the speed he was traveling. They also discovered that Saint Martin liked to spend a great deal of time alone sequestered in his office at Villa Elma, an expansive room located on the southeast corner of the mansion overlooking Lake Geneva, at precisely 1,238 feet above sea level.

  There can be an obvious drawback to receiving such a vast amount of intelligence--the possibility that a vital piece of the puzzle might be swamped by a tsunami of useless information. Gabriel sought to avoid this pitfall by making certain that at least half the team remained focused on the true prize of the Paris operation, Martin's laptop. The haul was not limited to the material contained on the computer the night of the operation in Paris. Indeed, through a clever feat of engineering, the computer automatically sent an update each time data was added or subtracted. It meant that whenever Martin opened a document, Gabriel's team opened it, too. They even instructed the computer to transmit video from its built-in camera in thirty-minute loops. Most of the video was silent and black. But for an hour or so each day, whenever Martin was at task, he seemed to be peering directly into the Highgate safe house, watching Gabriel's team as it rummaged through the secrets of his life.

  The contents of Martin's computer were encrypted, but the barriers quickly crumbled under the assault led by the two MIT-educated geniuses from Technical. Once they had penetrated the outer walls, the computer quickly belched forth thousands of documents that laid bare the inner workings of the Landesmann empire. Though the information was potentially worth millions to Martin's many competitors, it had little value to Gabriel, for it provided no additional intelligence on GVI's links to Keppler Werk GmbH or precisely what Keppler was secretly selling to the Iranians. Gabriel had learned from experience not to focus on what was visible in a computer's memory but on what was no longer there--the temporary files that floated like ghosts across the hard drive, the discarded documents that had lived there briefly before being tossed into the trash. Files are never truly deleted from a computer. Like radioactive waste, they can live on forever. Gabriel directed the technicians to focus their efforts on Martin's recycle bin, especially on a ghost folder lurking there that had been impervious to all attempts at retrieval.

  Gabriel's team did not toil in isolation. Indeed, because Masterpiece was an international endeavor, dissemination of its hard-earned product was international as well. The Americans received a feed over a secure link from Highgate to Grosvenor Square, while the British, after much internal bickering, decided that MI6 was the logical first recipient since Iran was its responsibility. Graham Seymour managed to retain overall operational ascendancy, however, and Thames House remained the nightly meeting point for the principals. The atmosphere remained largely collegial, despite the fact each side brought to the table different assumptions about Iranian intentions, different styles of analysis, and different national priorities. For the Americans and the British, a nuclear Iran represented a regional challenge; for Israel, an existential threat. Gabriel didn't dwell on such issues at the conference table. But then he didn't need to.

  His final stop at Thames House each night was the windowless cell of Nigel Whitcombe, who been handed control of the Zoe Reed watch. Despite the potential hazards involved in surveilling a British journalist, Whitcombe accepted the assignment without reservation. Like nearly everyone involved in Masterpiece, he had developed a bit of a schoolboy crush on Zoe and relished the opportunity to admire her for a few more days, even if from afar. The daily watch reports revealed no transgressions on her part and no evidence that she had broken discipline in any way. Each time Martin made contact with her, she duly reported it. She even forwarded to MI5 a brief message he had left on her home machine.

  "What did it say?" asked Gabriel.

  "The usual. I so enjoyed our time together, darling. Can't wait to see you in Geneva next week, darling. Something about a dress. I didn't understand that part." Whitcombe straightened the papers on his little headmasterly desk. "At some point, we're going to decide whether she has to attend Martin's little soiree or whether she should come down with a sudden case of swine flu instead."

  "I'm aware of that, Nigel."

  "May I offer an opinion?"

  "If you must."

  "Swine flu."

  "And what if her absence makes Martin suspicious?"

  "Better a suspicious Martin Landesmann than a dead British investigative reporter. That might not be good for my career."

  It was nearly midnight by the time Gabriel returned to the Highgate safe house. He found his team hard at work and an intriguing message from King Saul Boulevard waiting in his encrypted in-box. It seemed an old acquaintance from Paris wanted a word. Reading the message a second time, Gabriel ordered himself to be calm. Yes, it was possible this was what they were looking for, but it was probably nothing. A mistake, he thought. A waste of time when he had none to spare. But it was also possible he had just been granted the first piece of good fortune since Julian Isherwood had appeared on the cliffs of Cornwall to ask him to find a missing portrait by Rembrandt. Someone would have to check it out. But given the demands of Operation Masterpiece, it would have to be someone other than Gabriel. All of which explains why Eli Lavon, surveillance artist, archaeologist, and tracker of missing Holocaust assets, returned to Paris early the next morning. And why, shortly after one that afternoon, he was walking along the rue des Rosiers, twenty paces behind a memory militant named Hannah Weinberg.

  54

  THE MARAIS, PARIS

  She rounded the corner into rue Pavee and disappeared into the apartment house at No. 24. Lavon walked the length of the street twice, searching for evidence of surveillance, before presenting himself at the doorway. The directory identified the resident of apartment 4B as MME. BERTRAND. Lavon pressed the call button and peered benignly into the security camera.

  "Oui?"

  "I'm here to see Madame Weinberg, please."

  A silence, then, "Who are you, monsieur?"

  "My name is Eli Lavon. I'm--"

  "I know who you are, Monsieur Lavon. Just a moment."

  The entry buzzer moaned. Lavon crossed the damp interior courtyard, entered the foyer, and headed up the stairs. Waiting on the fourth-floor landing, arms folded, was Hannah Weinberg. She admitted Lavon into her apartment and quietly closed the door. Then she smiled and formally extended her hand.

  "It is an honor to meet you, Monsieur Lavon. As you might expect, you have many admirers at the Weinberg Center."

  "The honor is mine," Lavon said humbly. "I've been watching you from a distance. Your center is doing marvelous work here in Paris. Under increasingly difficult conditions, I might add."

  "We do what we can
, but I'm afraid it's probably not enough." A sadness crept into her gaze. "I'm so sorry about what happened in Vienna, Monsieur Lavon. The bombing affected all of us very deeply."

  "These are emotional issues," Lavon said.

  "On both sides." She managed a smile. "I was just making some coffee."

  "I'd love some."

  She led Lavon into the sitting room and disappeared into the kitchen. Lavon looked around at the stately old furnishings. He had worked on the operation that had drawn Hannah Weinberg into the gravitational pull of the Office and knew her family history well. He also knew that in a room located at the end of the hall hung a painting by Vincent van Gogh called Marguerite Gachet at Her Dressing Table. The blood-soaked operation involving the little-known work was one of many Gabriel Allon productions Lavon had tried hard to forget. He tamped down the memory now as Hannah Weinberg returned carrying two cups of cafe au lait. She handed one to Lavon and sat.

  "I assume this isn't a courtesy call, Monsieur Lavon."

  "No, Madame Weinberg."

  "You're here because of the documents?"

  Lavon nodded and sipped his coffee.

  "I didn't realize you were connected to..." Her voice trailed off.

  "To what?" Lavon asked.

  "Israeli intelligence," she said sotto voce.

  "Me? Do I really look cut out for that sort of work?"

  She examined him carefully. "I suppose not."

  "After the bombing in Vienna, I returned to my first love, which is archaeology. I'm on the faculty of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, but I still have many contacts in the Holocaust restitution field."

  "So how did you hear about the documents?"