The Heist Page 16

  “You were about to tell me why I’m supposed to open that safe for you,” Bittel said as he eased back into the evening traffic with his usual overabundance of caution.

  “Because the operation I’m running hit a snag, and for the moment I have nowhere else to turn.”

  “What kind of snag?”

  “A dead body.”

  “Where?”

  Gabriel hesitated.

  “Where?” asked Bittel again.

  “Stuttgart,” replied Gabriel.

  “I suppose it was that Arab who was shot in the head this morning in the city center?”

  “Who said he was an Arab?”

  “The BfV.”

  The BfV was Germany’s internal security service. It maintained close relations with its Alemannic brethren in Bern.

  “How much do they have on him?” asked Gabriel.

  “Almost nothing, which is why they reached out to us. It seems the killers took his wallet after they shot him.”

  “That wasn’t all they took.”

  “Were you responsible for his death?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Let me put it to you this way, Allon. Did you put a gun to his head and pull the trigger?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “It’s not such a far-fetched question. After all, you do have something of a track record when it comes to dead bodies on European soil.”

  Gabriel made no reply.

  “Do you know the name of the man who was inside the car at the time?”

  “He called himself Sam, but I have a feeling his real name was Samir.”

  “Last name?”

  “I never caught it.”

  “Passport?”

  “He spoke French very well. If I had to guess, he was from the Levant.”

  “Lebanon?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe Syria.”

  “Why was he killed?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You can do better than that, Allon.”

  “It’s possible he was in possession of a painting that looked a great deal like Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh.”

  “The one that was stolen from Amsterdam?”

  “Borrowed,” said Gabriel.

  “Who painted the forgery?”

  “I did.”

  “Why did Sam have it?”

  “I sold it to him for twenty-five million euros.”

  Bittel swore beneath his breath.

  “You asked, Bittel.”

  “Where’s the painting?”

  “Which painting?”

  “The real van Gogh,” snapped Bittel.

  “It’s in safe hands.”

  “And the money?”

  “Even safer hands.”

  “Why did you steal a van Gogh and sell a copy to an Arab named Sam?”

  “Because I’m looking for a Caravaggio.”

  “For whom?”

  “The Italians.”

  “Why is an Israeli intelligence officer looking for a painting for the Italians?”

  “Because he finds it hard to tell people no.”

  “And if I get you into that safe? What do you expect to find?”

  “To be honest with you, Bittel, I haven’t a clue.”

  Bittel exhaled heavily and reached for his phone.

  He made two calls in rapid succession. The first was to his shapely friend at the Freeport. The second was to a locksmith who occasionally did favors for the NDB in the Geneva area. The woman was waiting at the gate when they arrived; the locksmith appeared an hour after that. His name was Zimmer. He had a round, soft face and the unblinking gaze of a stuffed animal. His hand was so cool and tender that Gabriel released it quickly for fear of injuring it.

  He had in his possession a heavy rectangular case of black leather, which he clutched tightly as he followed Bittel and Gabriel through the outer door of Jack Bradshaw’s vault. If he was aware of the paintings, he gave no sign of it; he had eyes only for the small floor safe standing next to the desk. It had been built by a German manufacturer from Cologne. Zimmer was frowning, as though he had been hoping for something a bit more challenging.

  The locksmith, like the art restorer, did not like people watching him while he worked. As a result, Gabriel and Bittel were forced to confine themselves in the interior room of the vault that Yves Morel had used as his clandestine studio. They sat on the floor, backs resting against the wall, legs outstretched. It was obvious from the sounds radiating through the open door that Zimmer was using a technique known as weak-point drilling. The air smelled of warm metal. It reminded Gabriel of the smell of a recently fired gun. He looked at his wristwatch and frowned.

  “How long is this going to take?” he asked.

  “Some safes are easier than others.”

  “That’s why I’ve always preferred a carefully placed charge of plastic explosive. Semtex is a great equalizer.”

  Bittel pulled out his phone and scrolled through his e-mail inbox; Gabriel picked absently at the paint on Yves Morel’s palette: ocher, gold, crimson . . . Finally, an hour after Zimmer commenced work, there came a heavy metallic thump from the next room. The locksmith appeared in the doorway, clutching his black leather bag, and nodded once to Bittel. “I believe I can find my way out,” he said. And then he was gone.

  Gabriel and Bittel rose to their feet and walked into the next room. The door of the safe was slightly ajar, an inch, no more. Gabriel reached for it, but Bittel stopped him.

  “I’ll do it,” he said.

  He motioned for Gabriel to step back. Then he opened the door of the safe and peered into the interior. It was empty except for a white letter-size envelope. Bittel removed it and read the name written across the front.

  “What is it?” asked Gabriel.

  “It appears to be a letter.”

  “To whom?”

  Bittel held it toward Gabriel and said, “You.”

  It was more like a memorandum than a letter, an after-action field report written by a fallen spy with a conscience made guilty by treachery. Gabriel read it twice, once while still in Jack Bradshaw’s vault, and a second time while seated in the departure lounge of Geneva International Airport. His flight was called a few minutes after nine o’clock, first in French, then in English, and, finally, in Hebrew. The sound of his native language quickened his pulse. He slipped the letter into his overnight bag, rose, and boarded the plane.

  PART THREE

  THE OPEN WINDOW

  26

  KING SAUL BOULEVARD, TEL AVIV

  THE OFFICE BUILDING THAT STOOD at the far end of King Saul Boulevard was drab, featureless, and, best of all, anonymous. No emblem hung over its entrance, no brass lettering proclaimed the identity of its occupant. In fact, there was nothing at all to suggest it was the headquarters of one of the world’s most feared and respected intelligence services. A closer inspection of the structure, however, would have revealed the existence of a building within a building, one with its own power supply, its own water and sewer lines, and its own secure communications system. Employees carried two keys. One opened an unmarked door in the lobby; the other operated the lift. Those who committed the unpardonable sin of losing one or both of their keys were banished to the Judean Wilderness, never to be seen or heard from again.

  There were some employees who were too senior, or whose work was too sensitive, to show their faces in the lobby. They entered the building “black” through the underground parking garage, as Gabriel did thirty minutes after his flight from Geneva touched down at Ben-Gurion Airport. His motorcade included an escort vehicle filled with a heavily armed security team. He supposed it was a sign of things to come.

  Two of the security agents followed him into the elevator, which shot him to the top floor of the building. From the vestibule he made his way through a cipher-protected door into an anteroom where a woman in her late thirties sat behind a modern desk with a gleaming black surface. The desk had only a lamp and a secure multiline phone;
the woman had very long suntanned legs. Inside King Saul Boulevard she was known as the Iron Dome because of her matchless ability to shoot down unwanted requests for a moment with the boss. Her real name was Orit.

  “He’s in a meeting,” she said, glancing at the red light glowing over the boss’s impressive double door. “Have a seat. He won’t be long.”

  “Does he know I’m in the building?”

  “He knows.”

  Gabriel lowered himself onto what was quite possibly the most uncomfortable couch in all of Israel and stared at the red light blazing above the doorway. Then he looked at Orit, who smiled back at him uneasily.

  “Can I get you anything?” she asked.

  “A battering ram,” replied Gabriel.

  Finally, the light changed from red to green. Gabriel rose quickly and slipped into the office as the participants of the now-adjourned meeting were filing out a second doorway. Two of them he recognized. One was Rimona Stern, the chief of the Office’s Iran nuclear program. The other was Mikhail Abramov, a field agent and gunman who had worked closely with Gabriel on a number of high-profile operations. The suit he was wearing suggested a recent promotion.

  When the door closed, Gabriel turned slowly to face the room’s only other occupant. He was standing next to a large desk of smoked glass, an open file folder in his hand. He wore a gray suit that seemed a size too small and a white shirt with a fashionably high collar that left the impression his head was bolted to his powerful shoulders. His spectacles were of the small, rimless variety worn by German business executives who wish to appear youthful and trendy. His hair, or what remained of it, was gray stubble.

  “Since when does Mikhail attend meetings in the chief’s office?” asked Gabriel.

  “Since I promoted him,” replied Uzi Navot.

  “To what?”

  “Deputy chief of Special Ops.” Navot lowered the file and smiled insincerely. “Is it all right if I make personnel moves, Gabriel? After all, I’m still the chief for another year.”

  “I had plans for him.”

  “What sort of plans?”

  “I was actually going to put him in charge of Special Ops.”

  “Mikhail? He’s not ready, not by a long shot.”

  “He’ll be fine, so long as he has an experienced operational planner looking over his shoulder.”

  “Someone like you?”

  Gabriel was silent.

  “And what about me?” asked Navot. “Have you decided what you’re going to do yet?”

  “That’s entirely up to you.”

  “Obviously not.”

  Navot dropped the file folder onto his desk and pressed a button on his control panel that sent the venetian blinds falling slowly over the floor-to-ceiling bulletproof windows. He stood there for a moment in silence, imprisoned by bars of shadow. Gabriel glimpsed an unappealing portrait of his own future, a gray man in a gray cage.

  “I have to admit,” Navot said, “I’m deeply envious of you. Egypt is sliding into civil war, al-Qaeda is in control of a swath of land extending from Fallujah to the Mediterranean, and one of the bloodiest conflicts in modern history is raging on our northern border. And yet you have the time to go chasing after a stolen masterpiece for the Italian government.”

  “It wasn’t my idea, Uzi.”

  “You could have at least shown me the courtesy of seeking my approval when the Carabinieri came to you.”

  “Would you have given it?”

  “Of course not.”

  Navot walked slowly past his long executive conference table to his cozy executive seating area. The world’s television networks played silently on his video wall; the world’s newspapers were arrayed neatly on his coffee table.

  “The European police have been quite busy of late,” he said. “A murdered British expat in Lake Como, a stolen masterpiece by van Gogh, and now this.” He picked up a copy of Die Welt and held it up for Gabriel to see. “A dead Arab in the middle of Stuttgart. Three seemingly unconnected events with one thing in common.” Navot allowed the newspaper to drop onto the table. “Gabriel Allon, the future chief of Israel’s secret intelligence service.”

  “Two things, actually.”

  “What’s the second?”

  “LXR Investments of Luxembourg.”

  “Who owns LXR?”

  “The worst man in the world.”

  “Is he on the Office payroll?”

  “No, Uzi,” said Gabriel, smiling. “Not yet.”

  Navot knew the broad outlines of Gabriel’s search for the missing Caravaggio, for he had watched it from a distance: airline reservations, credit card expenditures, border crossings, requests for safe properties, news accounts of a vanished masterpiece. Now, seated in the office that would soon be his, Gabriel completed the picture, beginning with General Ferrari’s summons in Venice and ending with the death of a man called Sam in Stuttgart—a man who had just paid twenty-five million euros for Sunflowers, oil on canvas, 95 by 73 centimeters, by Gabriel Allon. Then he held up the three pages of the letter that Jack Bradshaw had left for him in the Geneva Freeport.

  “Sam’s real name was Samir Basara. Bradshaw first met him when he was working in Beirut. Samir was a classic hustler. Drugs, weapons, girls, all the things that made life interesting in a place like Beirut in the eighties. But it turns out Samir wasn’t actually Lebanese. Samir was from Syria, and he was working for Syrian intelligence.”

  “Was he still working for them when he was killed?”

  “Absolutely,” replied Gabriel.

  “Doing what?”

  “Buying stolen art.”

  “From Jack Bradshaw?”

  Gabriel nodded. “Samir and Bradshaw renewed their relationship fourteen months ago over lunch in Milan. Samir had a business proposition. He said he had a client, a wealthy businessman from the Middle East who was interested in acquiring paintings. Within a few weeks, Bradshaw used his contacts in the dark corners of the art world to secure a Rembrandt and a Monet, both of which happened to be stolen. That didn’t bother Samir. In fact, he rather liked it. He gave Bradshaw five million dollars and told him to find more.”

  “How did he pay for the paintings?”

  “He funneled the money into Bradshaw’s company through something called LXR Investments of Luxembourg.”

  “Who owns LXR Investments?”

  “I’m getting to that,” said Gabriel.

  “Why did Sam want stolen paintings?”

  “I’m getting to that, too.” Gabriel looked down at the letter. “At this point Jack Bradshaw went on something of a shopping spree for his new moneyed client—a couple of Renoirs, a Matisse, a Corot that was stolen from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts back in 1972. He also acquired several important Italian paintings that weren’t supposed to leave the country. Samir still wasn’t satisfied. He said his client wanted something big. That’s when Bradshaw suggested the holy grail of missing paintings.”

  “The Caravaggio?”

  Gabriel nodded.

  “Where was it?”

  “Still in Sicily, in the hands of the Cosa Nostra. Bradshaw went to Palermo and negotiated the deal. After all these years, the mafiosi were actually glad to be rid of it. Bradshaw smuggled it into Switzerland in a load of carpets. Needless to say, the altarpiece wasn’t in great condition when it arrived. He accepted five million euros as down payment from Samir and hired a French forger to make the Nativity presentable again. But something happened before he could complete the sale.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He figured out who was really buying the paintings.”

  “Who was it?”

  Before answering, Gabriel returned to a question Navot had posed a few minutes earlier: Why was Samir Basara’s wealthy client in the market for stolen paintings? To answer it, Gabriel first explained the four basic categories of art thieves: the penniless art lover, the incompetent loser, the professional, and the organized criminal. The organized criminal, he said, was responsible fo
r most major thefts. Sometimes he had a buyer waiting, but often stolen paintings ended up being used as a form of underworld cash, traveler’s checks for the criminal class. A Monet, for example, might be used as collateral for a shipment of Russian arms; a Picasso, for Turkish heroin. Eventually, someone along the chain of possession would decide to cash in, usually with the help of a knowledgeable fence like Jack Bradshaw. A painting worth $200 million on the legitimate market would be worth $20 million on the dirty market. Twenty million that could never be traced, added Gabriel. Twenty million that could never be frozen by the governments of the United States and the European Union.

  “Do you see where I’m going with this, Uzi?”

  “Who is it?” Navot asked again.

  “He’s a man who’s been presiding over a rather messy civil war, a man who’s used systematic torture, indiscriminate artillery barrages, and chemical weapons attacks against his own people. He saw Hosni Mubarak put into a cage and watched Muammar Gaddafi being lynched by a bloodthirsty mob. As a result, he’s concerned about what might happen to him if he falls, which is why he asked Samir Basara to prepare a little nest egg for him and his family.”

  “Are you saying Jack Bradshaw was selling stolen paintings to the president of Syria?”

  Gabriel looked up at the images flickering across Navot’s video wall. The regime had just shelled a rebel-held neighborhood in Damascus. The number of dead was incalculable.

  “The Syrian ruler and his clan are worth billions,” said Navot.

  “True,” replied Gabriel. “But the Americans and the EU are freezing his assets and the assets of his closest aides wherever they can find them. Even Switzerland has frozen hundreds of millions in Syrian assets.”

  “But most of the fortune is still out there somewhere.”

  “For now,” said Gabriel.

  “Why not gold bars or vaults filled with cash? Why paintings?”

  “I assume he has gold and cash, too. After all, as any investment adviser will tell you, diversity is the key to long-term success. But if I were the one advising the Syrian president,” Gabriel added, “I’d tell him to invest in assets that are easy to conceal and transport.”