The Messenger Page 17

  THE DOGS came first, two coal-black terriers that shot from the Diplomatic Entrance like bullets from a gun barrel and launched a preemptive strike on Gabriel’s trousers. The president emerged a few seconds later. He advanced on Gabriel with one hand out while the other was gesturing for the terriers to break off their onslaught. The two men shook hands briefly, then set off along the footpath that ran around the periphery of the South Lawn. The terriers launched one more sortie against Gabriel’s ankles. Carter watched as Gabriel turned and murmured something in Hebrew that sent the dogs scurrying toward the protection of a Secret Service agent.

  Their conversation lasted just five minutes, and to Carter it seemed the president did most of the talking. They moved at a brisk pace, stopping only once in order to settle what appeared to be a minor disagreement. Gabriel removed his hands from his coat pockets and used them to illustrate whatever point he was trying to make. The president appeared unconvinced at first, then he nodded and clapped Gabriel hard on the shoulders.

  They completed their circuit and parted at the Diplomatic Entrance. As Gabriel started back toward East Executive Drive the dogs trotted after him, then turned and darted into the White House after their master. Gabriel slipped through the open gate and climbed into Carter’s car.

  “How was he?” Carter asked as they turned into 15th Street.

  “Resolute.”

  “It looked like you had a bit of an argument.”

  “I’d characterize it as a polite disagreement.”

  “About what?”

  “Our conversation was private, Adrian, and it will remain so.”

  “Good man,” said Carter.

  18.

  London

  THE ANNOUNCEMENT THAT Isherwood Fine Arts had sold Daniel in the Lions’ Den by Peter Paul Rubens for the sum of ten million pounds came on the first Wednesday of the new year. By Friday the clamor had been eclipsed by a rumor that Isherwood was bringing aboard a partner.

  It was Oliver Dimbleby, Isherwood’s tubby nemesis from King Street, who heard it first, though later even Dimbleby would be hard pressed to pin down its precise origin. To the best of his recollection the seeds were planted by Penelope, the luscious hostess from the little wine bar in Jermyn Street where Isherwood could often be seen whiling away slow afternoons. “She’s blond,” Penelope had said. “Natural blond, Oliver. Not like your girls. Pretty. American with a bit of an English accent.” At first Penelope suspected Isherwood was once again making a fool of himself with a younger woman, but she soon realized that she was witnessing a job interview. “And not just any job, Oliver. Sounded like something big.”

  Dimbleby would have thought nothing of it had he not received a report of a second sighting, this one from Percy, a notorious gossip who waited tables in the breakfast room at the Dorchester Hotel. “They definitely weren’t lovers,” he told Dimbleby with the assurance of a man who knew his material. “It was all salary and benefits. There was a fair amount of haggling. She was playing hard to get.” Dimbleby slipped Percy ten quid and asked whether he’d caught the woman’s name. “Bancroft,” said Percy. “Sarah Bancroft. Stayed two nights. Bill paid in its entirety by Isherwood Fine Arts, Mason’s Yard, St. James’s.”

  A third sighting, a cozy dinner at Mirabelle, confirmed to Dimbleby that something was definitely afoot. The next evening he bumped into Jeremy Crabbe, director of the Bonhams Old Masters department, at the bar in Greene’s restaurant. Crabbe was drinking a very large whiskey and still licking his wounds over Isherwood’s monumental coup. “I had that Rubens, Oliver, but Julie outfoxed me. He’s ten million richer, and I’m facing a firing squad at dawn. And now he’s expanding operations. Getting himself a flashy new front man, from what I hear. But don’t quote me, Oliver. It’s nothing but malicious talk.” When Dimbleby asked whether Isherwood’s flashy front man might in fact be an American woman named Sarah Bancroft, Crabbe gave him a sideways smile. “Anything’s possible, love. Remember, we are talking about Juicy Julie Isherwood.”

  For the next forty-eight hours Oliver Dimbleby devoted his copious spare time to researching the provenance of one Sarah Bancroft. A drinking companion on the faculty of the Courtauld described her as “a meteor.” The same companion learned from an acquaintance at Harvard that her dissertation was considered required reading for anyone serious about the German Expressionists. Dimbleby then dialed up an old chum who cleaned paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and asked him to poke around the Phillips for clues about her departure. It was a squabble over money, reported the chum. Two days later he called Dimbleby back and said it had something to do with an office love affair gone bad. A third call brought the news that Sarah Bancroft had parted company with the Phillips Collection on good terms and that the motive for her departure was nothing more than a desire to spread her wings. As for her personal life, meaning her marital status, she was described as single and unavailable.

  Which left but one unanswered question: Why was Isherwood suddenly taking on a partner? Jeremy Crabbe heard he was ill. Roddy Hutchinson heard he had a tumor in his abdomen the size of a honeydew melon. Penelope, the girl from Isherwood’s wine bar, heard he was in love with a wealthy Greek divorcee and was planning to spend his remaining days in blessed fornication on a beach in Mykonos. Dimbleby, though he found the lavish rumors entertaining, suspected that the truth was far more prosaic. Julian was getting on. Julian was tired. Julian had just pulled off a coup. Why not bring someone on board to help lighten the load?

  His suspicions were confirmed, three days later, when a small item appeared at the bottom of the Times arts page, announcing that Sarah Bancroft, formerly of the Phillips Collection in Washington, would be joining Isherwood Fine Arts as its first associate director. “I’ve been at this for forty years,” Isherwood told The Times. “I needed someone to help shoulder the burden, and the angels sent me Sarah.”

  SHE ARRIVED the following week, on the Monday. By coincidence Oliver Dimbleby was waddling along Duke Street at the precise moment she turned through the passageway into Mason’s Yard, wearing a Burberry trench coat, her blond hair swept back so that it hung between her shoulder blades like a satin cape. Dimbleby did not realize then who she was, but Oliver being Oliver, he poked his head through the passageway for a look-see at her backside. To his surprise she was making a beeline toward Isherwood’s gallery in the far corner of the quadrangle. She rang the bell that first day and had to wait two very long minutes for Tanya, Isherwood’s lethargic secretary, to buzz her up. It was Tanya’s initiation of the new girl, thought Dimbleby. Tanya, he suspected, would be gone by Friday.

  Her impact was instantaneous. Sarah was a whirlwind. Sarah was a much-needed breath of fresh air. Sarah was all things Isherwood was not: prompt, regimented, disciplined, and, of course, very American. She started arriving at the gallery at eight each morning. Isherwood, who was used to strolling into work at the Italianate hour of ten, was forced to trim his sails accordingly. She put his disgraceful books in order and spruced up the large common office they shared. She replaced the missing letters on the intercom and the soiled brown carpeting on the stairs. She began the painful process of liquidating Isherwood’s vast pile of dead stock and entered into quiet negotiations to take over the adjacent office space currently occupied by Miss Archer’s dreary little travel agency. “She’s an American,” said Dimbleby. “She’s expansionist by nature. She’ll conquer your country and afterwards tell you it’s for your own good.”

  Tanya, as it turned out, did not survive till Friday and was last seen leaving the gallery on the Wednesday evening. Her departure was handled by Sarah and was therefore accomplished with a smoothness not usually seen at Isherwood Fine Arts. The generous severance package—“Very generous from what I hear,” said Dimbleby—permitted her to take a long, well-deserved winter holiday in Morocco. By the next Monday there was a new girl on duty in Isherwood’s anteroom, a tall olive-skinned Italian woman with riotous dark hair and eyes the color of caramel n
amed Elena Farnese. An informal straw poll, conducted by Roddy Hutchinson, found that among the men of St. James’s she was regarded as even more beautiful than the fetching Sarah. The name “Isherwood Fine Arts” suddenly took on new meaning among the denizens of Duke Street, and the gallery was hit by a rash of drop-bys and pop-ins. Even Jeremy Crabbe from Bonhams started dropping by unannounced just to have a glimpse at Isherwood’s collection.

  After shoring up the gallery Sarah began venturing out to meet her compatriots. She did formal meetings with the leading lights at the various London auction houses. She lunched expensively with the collectors and had quiet drinks in the late afternoon with their advisers, their consultants, and their assorted hangers-on. She popped into the galleries of Isherwood’s competitors and said hello. She stopped at the bar at Green’s once or twice and bought a round for the boys. Oliver Dimbleby finally screwed up the courage to invite her to lunch, but wisely she made it a coffee instead. Next afternoon they had a latte in a paper cup at an American chain on Piccadilly. Oliver fondled her hand and invited her to dinner. “I’m afraid I don’t do dinner,” she said. Why ever not? wondered Oliver as he waddled back to his gallery in King Street. Why ever not indeed?

  UZI NAVOT had had his eye on it for some time. It was a perfect port in a storm, he’d always thought. The sort of place to stick in your back pocket for the inevitable rainy day. It was located just ten miles beyond the M25 ring road in Surrey—or, as he explained to Gabriel, an hour by Tube and car from Isherwood’s gallery in St. James’s. The house was a rambling Tudor pile with high gables and tiny leaded windows, reached by a long rutted beech drive and shielded by a forbidding brick-and-iron gate. There was a tumbledown barn and a pair of shattered greenhouses. There was a tangled garden for thinking deep thoughts, eight private acres for wrestling with one’s demons, and a stock pond that hadn’t been fished for fifteen years. The rental agent, when handing Navot the keys, had referred to it as Winslow Haven. To a field hand like Navot it was Nirvana.

  Dina, Rimona, and Yaakov worked in the dusty library; Lavon and Yossi set up shop in a rambling rumpus room hung with the heads of many dead animals. As for Gabriel, he made a shakedown studio for himself in a light-filled second-floor drawing room overlooking the garden. Because he could not show his face round the art world of London, he dispatched others to procure his supplies. Their missions were special operations unto themselves. Dina and Yossi made separate trips to L. Cornelissen & Sons in Russell Street, carefully dividing the order between them so that the girls who worked there would not realize they were filling the order of a professional restorer. Yaakov went to a lighting shop in Earl’s Court to purchase Gabriel’s halogen lamps and then to a master carpenter in Camden Town to collect a custom easel. Eli Lavon saw to the frame. A newly minted expert in all things al-Bakari, he took issue with Gabriel’s decision to go antique Italian. “Zizi’s taste is haute French,” he said. “The Italian will clash with Zizi’s sense of style.” But Gabriel always found that the more muscular carving of the Italian frames best suited Vincent’s impasto style, and so it was an Italian frame that Lavon ordered from the enchanted Bury Street premises of Arnold Wiggins & Sons.

  Sarah came to them early each evening, always by a different route, and always with Lavon handling the countersurveillance. She was a quick study and, as Gabriel had anticipated, was blessed with a flawless memory. Still, he was careful not to smother her beneath an avalanche of information. They started usually by seven, broke at nine for a family dinner in the formal dining room, then carried on until nearly midnight, when she was shuttled back to her apartment in Chelsea by Yossi, who was staying in a flat across the street.

  They spent a week on Zizi al-Bakari himself before branching off into his associates and the other members of his entourage and inner circle. Special attention was paid to Wazir bin Talal, the omnipresent chief of AAB security. Bin Talal was an intelligence service unto himself, with a staff of security agents inside AAB and a network of paid informants scattered around the world that fed him reports about potential threats to AAB properties or Zizi himself. “If Zizi likes the merchandise, it’s bin Talal who does the due diligence,” explained Lavon. “No one gets near the chief without first passing muster with bin Talal. And if anyone steps out of line, it’s bin Talal who lowers the boom.” Yossi’s research uncovered no fewer than a half dozen former al-Bakari associates who had died under mysterious circumstances, a fact that was withheld from Sarah at Gabriel’s request.

  In the days that followed, the Surrey safe house was visited by what were known in the Office as “experts with handles.” The first was a woman from Hebrew University who spent two nights lecturing Sarah on Saudi social customs. Next came a psychiatrist who spent two more nights counseling her on ways to combat fear and anxiety while working undercover. A specialist in communications gave her a primer on elementary forms of secret writing. A martial arts trainer taught her the basics of Israeli-style hand-to-hand combat. Gabriel chose Lavon, the greatest watcher in the history of the Office, to give her a crash course in the art of human and electronic surveillance. “You will be entering a hostile camp,” he told her in summation. “Assume they’re watching your every move and listening to your every word. If you do that, nothing can go wrong.”

  Gabriel, for the most part, remained a spectator to her training. He greeted her when she arrived at the house each evening, joined the team for dinner, then saw her off again at midnight when she set out for London with Yossi. As the days wore on, they began to detect a restlessness in him. Lavon, who had worked with him more than the others, diagnosed Gabriel’s mood as impatience. “He wants to put her into play,” Lavon said, “but he knows she’s not ready.” He began spending extended periods before the canvas, painstakingly repairing the damage done to Marguerite. The intensity of the work only increased his restiveness. Lavon advised him to take breaks now and again, and Gabriel reluctantly agreed. He found a pair of Wellington boots in the mudroom and ventured out on solitary marches over the footpaths surrounding the village. He dug a rod and reel from a storage room in the cellar and used it to haul an enormous brown trout from the stock pond. In the barn, concealed beneath a tarpaulin, he found an ancient MG motorcar that looked as though it hadn’t been driven in twenty years. Three days later the others heard a sputtering sound emanating from the barn, followed by an explosion that reverberated over the countryside. Yaakov came running down from the house, fearful Gabriel had blown himself to bits, but instead found him standing over the open hood of the MG, covered in engine grease up to his elbows and smiling for the first time since they’d come to Surrey. “It works,” he shouted over the thunderous rattle of the motor. “The damned thing still runs.”

  That evening he joined in Sarah’s training session for the first time. Lavon and Yaakov were not surprised, for the topic of discussion was none other that Ahmed bin Shafiq, the man who had become Gabriel’s personal bête noire. He chose Dina, with her pleasant voice and patina of early widowhood, to deliver the briefings. On the first night she lectured on Group 205, bin Shafiq’s secret unit within the GID, and showed how the combination of Wahhabi ideology and Saudi money had wreaked havoc across the Middle East and South Asia. On the second night she recounted bin Shafiq’s journey from loyal servant of the Saudi state to mastermind of the Brotherhood of Allah. Then she described in detail the operation against the Vatican, though she made no mention of the fact that Gabriel had been present at the scene of the crime. Gabriel realized that much of the information was superfluous, but he wanted Sarah to have no doubt in her mind that Ahmed bin Shafiq had earned the fate that awaited him.

  On the final night they showed her a series of computer-generated photo illustrations of how bin Shafiq might look now. Bin Shafiq with a beard. Bin Shafiq with a balding pate. Bin Shafiq with a gray wig. With a black wig. With curly hair. With no hair at all. With his sharp Bedouin features softened by a plastic surgeon. But it was the wounded arm that would be her most valuable clu
e to his identity, Gabriel told her. The scar on the inside of his forearm he would never show. The slightly withered hand that he would never offer and keep safely tucked away, hidden from infidel eyes.

  “We know he’s concealed somewhere within Zizi’s empire,” Gabriel said. “He might come as an investment banker or a portfolio manager. He might come as a real estate developer or a pharmaceutical executive. He might come in a month. He might come in a year. He might never come. But if he does come, you can be certain he’ll be well mannered and worldly and seem like anything but a professional terrorist. Don’t look for a terrorist or someone who acts like a terrorist. Just look for a man.”

  He gathered up the photo illustrations. “We want to know about everyone who moves in and out of Zizi’s orbit. We want you to gather as many names as you can. But this is the man we’re looking for.” Gabriel placed a photograph on the table in front of her. “This is the man we want.” Another photograph. “This is the man we’re after.” Another. “He’s the reason we’re all here instead of being home with our families and our children.” Another. “He’s the reason we asked you to give up your life and join us.” Another. “If you see him, you’re to get us the name he’s using and the company he’s working for. Get the country of his passport if you can.” Another photograph. “If you’re not sure it’s him, it doesn’t matter. Tell us. If it doesn’t turn out to be him, it doesn’t matter. Tell us. Nothing happens based on your word alone. No one gets hurt because of you, Sarah. You’re only the messenger.”

  “And if I give you a name?” she asked. “What happens then?”

  Gabriel looked at his watch. “I think it’s time Sarah and I had a word in private. Would you all excuse us?”

  HE LED HER upstairs to his studio and switched on the halogen lamps. Marguerite Gachet glowed seductively under the intense white light. Sarah sat down in an ancient wingchair; Gabriel slipped on his magnifying visor and prepared his palette.