Gabriel Allon 10 - The Rembrandt Affair Read online

  Brunner answered.

  "Can you get them out of the house with no one noticing?"

  "No problem."

  "Be careful, Jonas. He didn't do this alone."

  "What do we do after we get them off the property?"

  "I have a few questions I'd like to ask them. In private."

  "Where should we take them?"

  "East," Muller said. "You know the place."

  Brunner did. "What about Monique and Martin?" he asked.

  "As soon as the last guest leaves, I want them in the helicopter."

  "Monique isn't going to be happy."

  "Monique doesn't have a choice."

  The line went dead. Brunner sighed and hung up the phone.

  GIVEN THE jet-setting nature of the Kempinski's clientele, changes in itinerary were the norm rather than the exception. Regardless, the wave of early departures swamping the reception desk that evening was unusual. First there was an American couple who claimed to have a child in distress. Then there was a pair of Brits who argued bitterly from the time they stepped off the elevator until the moment they finally climbed into their rented Volvo. Five minutes later came a meek figure with disastrous hair who requested a taxi to the Gare de Cornavin, followed soon after by a trim man with gray temples and green eyes who said nothing while the receptionist prepared his bill. He endured a five-minute wait for his rented Audi A6 with admirable patience, though he was obviously annoyed by the delay. When the car finally came, he tossed his bags into the backseat and gave the valet a generous tip before driving away.

  It was not the first time the staff of the Kempinski had been misled by guests, but the scale of the deception foisted upon them that night was unprecedented. There was no child in distress and no source of genuine anger between the bickering couple with British passports. In fact, only one of them was actually British, and that had been a long time ago. Within ten minutes of departing the hotel, both couples had taken up positions along the rue de Lausanne, along with the driver of the very expensive S-Class Mercedes sedan. As for the man with green eyes and gray temples, his destination was the Hotel Metropole--though by the time he arrived at the check-in counter he was no longer Jonathan Albright of Greenwich, Connecticut, but Heinrich Kiever of Berlin, Germany. Upon entering his room, he hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on his door and immediately established secure communications with his newly redeployed team. Eli Lavon arrived ten minutes later.

  "Any change?" he asked.

  "Just one," said Gabriel. "The first guests are starting to leave."

  67

  GENEVA

  Zoe thought she heard the sound of approaching footsteps. Whether it was five men or five hundred, she could not tell. She lay motionless on the damp floor, her head still propped against Mikhail's shoulder. The duct tape around her wrists had cut off her circulation, and her hands felt as though a thousand needles were pricking them. She was shaking with cold and fear. And not just for herself. Zoe reckoned she had been locked in the cellar for at least an hour, and Mikhail had yet to regain consciousness. He was still breathing, though, deeply, steadily. Zoe imagined she was breathing for him.

  The footfalls drew closer. Zoe heard the heavy door of the room swing open and saw the beam of a flashlight playing over the walls. Eventually, it found her eyes. Behind it, she recognized the familiar silhouette of Jonas Brunner. He examined Mikhail with little concern, then tore the duct tape from Zoe's mouth. She immediately began to scream for help. Brunner silenced her with two hard slaps across the face.

  "What in God's name are you doing, Jonas? This is--"

  "Exactly what you and your friend deserve," he said, cutting her off. "You've been lying to us, Zoe. And if you continue to lie, you're only going to make your situation worse."

  "My situation? Are you mad, Jonas?"

  Brunner only smiled.

  "Where's Martin?"

  "Mr. Landesmann," Brunner said pointedly, "is busy saying good night to his guests. He asked me to see you out. Both of you."

  "See us out? Look at my friend, Jonas. He's unconscious. He needs a doctor."

  "So do several of my best men. And he'll get a doctor when he tells us who he's working for."

  "He works for himself, you idiot! He's a millionaire."

  Brunner gave another smile. "You like men with money, don't you, Zoe?"

  "If it wasn't for men with money, Jonas, you'd be writing parking tickets in some shitty little village in the Alps."

  Zoe never saw the blow coming. A sweeping backhand, it drove her head sideways into Mikhail's blood-soaked neck. Mikhail seemed to stir, then went motionless again. Zoe's cheek radiated with pain, and she could taste blood in her mouth. She closed her eyes, and for an instant it seemed Gabriel was speaking quietly into her ear. You're Zoe Reed, he was saying. You make mincemeat of people like Martin Landesmann. No one tells you what to do. And no one ever lays a hand on you. She opened her eyes and saw Brunner's face floating behind the glow of the flashlight.

  "Who do you work for?" he asked.

  "The Financial Journal of London. Which means you just slapped the wrong fucking girl, Jonas."

  "Tonight?" Brunner asked as if addressing a dull pupil. "Who are you working for tonight, Zoe?"

  "I'm not working tonight, Jonas. I came here at Martin's invitation. And I was having a wonderful time until you and your thugs grabbed me and locked me in this godforsaken room. What the hell is going on?"

  Brunner studied her for a moment, then looked at Mikhail. "You're here because this man is a spy. We found him in Mr. Landesmann's office during the film. He was stealing material from Mr. Landesmann's computer."

  "A spy? He's a businessman. An oil trader of some sort."

  Brunner held a small silver object before her eyes. "Have you ever seen this before?"

  "It's a flash drive, Jonas. Most people have one."

  "That's true. But most people don't have these." Brunner held up an ultraviolet flashlight, a device with wires and alligator clips, and a miniature radio with an earpiece. "Your friend is a professional intelligence officer, Zoe. And we believe you are, too."

  "You've got to be kidding, Jonas. I'm a reporter."

  "So why did you bring a spy into Mr. Landesmann's home tonight?"

  Zoe stared directly into Brunner's face. The words she spoke were not hers. They had been written for her by a man who did not exist.

  "I don't know much about him, Jonas. I bumped into him at a reception. He came on very strong. He bought me expensive gifts. He took me to nice restaurants. He treated me very well. In hindsight..."

  "What, Zoe?"

  "Maybe none of it was real. Maybe I was deceived by him."

  Brunner stroked the inflamed skin of her cheek. Zoe recoiled.

  "I'd like to believe you, Zoe, but I can't let you go without corroborating your story. As a good reporter, you surely understand why I need a second source."

  "In a few minutes, my editor is going to be calling to ask about the party. If he doesn't hear from me--"

  "He'll assume you're having a wonderful time and leave a message on your voice mail."

  "More than three hundred people saw me here tonight, Jonas. And unless you let me out of here very soon, not one of them is going to see me leave."

  "But that's not true, Zoe. We all saw you leave, including Mrs. Landesmann. The two of you had a very pleasant conversation shortly before you and Mr. Danilov got into your car and returned to your hotel."

  "Are you forgetting that we don't have a car, Jonas? You brought us here."

  "That's true, but Mr. Danilov insisted on having his own driver pick him up. I assume his driver is also an intelligence officer." Brunner gave her a humorless smile. "Allow me to present you with the facts of life, Zoe. Your friend committed a serious crime on Swiss soil tonight, and spies don't go running to the police when things go wrong. Which means you could vanish from the face of the earth and no one will ever know what happened."

  "I told you, Jonas, I h
ardly--"

  "Yes, yes, Zoe," Brunner said mockingly, "I heard you the first time. But I still need that second source."

  Brunner motioned with the flashlight, prompting several of his men to enter. They covered Zoe's mouth with duct tape again, then wrapped her in thick woolen blankets and bound her so tightly that even the slightest movement was impossible. Enveloped now in a suffocating blackness, Zoe could see but one thing--the terrible vision of Mikhail lying on the floor of the cellar, bound, unconscious, his shirt soaked in blood.

  One of the guards asked Zoe if she could breathe. This time, she made no response. The foot soldiers of Zentrum Security seemed to find that amusing, and Zoe heard only laughter as she was lifted from the ground and borne slowly from the cellar as if to her own grave. It was not a grave where they placed her but the trunk of a car. As it moved forward, Zoe began to shake uncontrollably. There is no safe house in Highgate, she told herself. No girl named Sally. No tweedy Englishman named David. No green-eyed assassin named Gabriel Allon. There was only Martin. Martin whom she had once loved. Martin who now was sending her into the mountains of Switzerland to be killed.

  68

  GENEVA

  The exodus of guests from Villa Elma began as a trickle at midnight, but by quarter past it had become a torrent of steel and tinted glass. As Shamron had predicted, Martin and his men held a distinct advantage since nearly all the cars leaving the party were black and of German manufacture. Roughly two-thirds headed left toward central Geneva while the remaining third turned right toward Lausanne and Montreux. Positioned in three separate vehicles along the road, Gabriel's team watched the passing vehicles for anything out of the ordinary. A car with two men in the front seat. A car traveling at an unusually high rate of speed. A car riding a bit low on its rear axle.

  Twice pursuits were undertaken. Twice pursuits were quickly called off. Dina and Mordecai gave needless chase to a BMW sedan for several miles along the lakeshore while Yossi and Rimona briefly shadowed a Mercedes SL coupe as its occupants wandered Geneva apparently searching for the next party. From his holding point at the gas station, Yaakov saw nothing worth chasing. He just sat with his hands wrapped tightly around the wheel, berating himself for ever letting Zoe and Mikhail out of his sight. Yaakov had spent years running informants and spies in the worst hellholes of the West Bank and Gaza without getting a single one killed. And to think he was about to suffer the first loss of his career here, along the tranquil shores of Lake Geneva. Not possible, he thought. Madness...

  But it was possible, and the likelihood of such an outcome seemed to increase with each whispered transmission flowing from Gabriel's desperate team to the new command center at the Hotel Metropole. It was Eli Lavon who communicated directly with the team and Lavon who filed the updates to London. Gabriel monitored the radio traffic from his outpost in the window. His gaze was fixed on the lights of Villa Elma burning like bonfires on the far shore of the lake.

  Shortly after one a.m., the lights were extinguished, signaling the official conclusion of Martin's annual gala. Within minutes, Gabriel heard the beating of rotors and saw the running lights of a helicopter descending slowly toward Martin's lawn. It remained there scarcely more than a minute, then rose once again and turned eastward over the lake. Lavon joined Gabriel at the window and watched the helicopter disappear into the darkness.

  "Do you suppose Mikhail and Zoe are on that bird?"

  "They could be," Gabriel conceded. "But if I had to guess, I'd say that's Martin and Monique."

  "Where do you think they're going?"

  "At this hour...I can think of only one place."

  AS IT turned out, it took just fifteen minutes for Graham Seymour to get the two Office computer technicians from the safe house in Highgate to Grosvenor Square. They were quickly joined by four cybersleuths from MI5, along with a team of Iran analysts from the CIA and MI6. Indeed, by midnight London time, more than a dozen officers from four intelligence services were huddled around the computer in the fishbowl, watched over intently by Chiara. As for the four most senior members of Operation Masterpiece, they remained at their posts, staring glumly at the messages streaming across the status boards.

  "Looks as if our boy has decided to flee the scene of the crime," Seymour said, face buried in his hands. "Do you think there's any way Mikhail and Zoe are still inside that mansion?"

  "I suppose there's always a chance," said Adrian Carter, "but Martin doesn't strike me as the sort to leave a mess lying around. Which means the clock is now definitely ticking."

  "That's true," said Shamron. "But we have several things working in our favor."

  "Really?" asked Seymour incredulously, gesturing toward the status boards. "Because from where I sit, it looks as though Zoe and Mikhail are about to disappear without a trace."

  "No one's going to disappear." Shamron paused, then added gloomily, "At least, not right away." He laboriously lit a cigarette. "Martin isn't stupid, Graham. He'll want to know exactly who Mikhail and Zoe are working for. And he'll want to know how much damage has been done. Getting information like that takes time, especially when a man like Mikhail Abramov is involved. Mikhail will make them work for it. That's what he's trained to do."

  "And what if they decide to take a shortcut?" asked Seymour. "How long do you expect Zoe to be able to hold up?"

  "I'm afraid I have to side with Graham," said Carter. "The only way we're going to get them back is to make a deal."

  "With whom?" asked Navot.

  "At this point, our options are rather limited. Either we call Swiss security or we deal directly with Martin."

  "Have you ever stopped to consider they might be the same thing? After all, this is Switzerland we're talking about. The DAP exists not only to protect the interests of the Swiss Confederation but of its financial oligarchy as well. And not necessarily in that order."

  "And don't forget," Shamron said, "Landesmann owns Zentrum Security, which is filled with former officers of the DAP. That means we can't go to Martin on bended knee. If we do, he'll be able to rally the Swiss government to his defense. And we could lose everything we've worked for."

  "The centrifuges?" Seymour drew a heavy breath and stared at the row of digital clocks at the front of the ops center. "Let me make something very clear, gentlemen. Her Majesty's Government has no intention of allowing harm to come to a prominent British subject tonight. Therefore, Her Majesty's Government will go to the Swiss authorities independently, if necessary, to secure a deal for Zoe's release."

  "A separate peace? Is that what you're suggesting?"

  "I'm not suggesting anything. I'm telling you my patience has limits."

  "May I remind you, Graham, that you're not the only one with a citizen at risk? And may I also remind you that by going to the DAP you will be exposing our entire operation against Martin?"

  "I'm aware of that, Ari. But I'm afraid my girl trumps your agent. And your operation."

  "I didn't realize we were the only ones involved in this," Navot said acidly.

  Seymour made no response.

  "How long will you give us, Graham?"

  "Six a.m. London time, seven a.m. Geneva."

  "That's not long."

  "I understand," Seymour said. "But it's all the time you have."

  Shamron turned to Navot.

  "I'm afraid the Geneva team has outlived its usefulness. In fact, at this point they're our biggest liability."

  "Withdrawal?"

  "Immediate."

  "They're not going to like it."

  "They don't have a choice." Shamron pointed at the technicians and analysts crowded around the computers in the fishbowl. "For the moment, our fate is in their hands."

  "And if they can't find anything by six o'clock?"

  "We'll make a deal." Shamron crushed out his cigarette. "That's what we do. That's what we always do."

  IN THE finest tradition of Office field commands, the message that arrived on Gabriel's computer twenty seconds later was br
ief and entirely lacking in ambiguity. It came as no surprise--in fact, Gabriel had already instructed the team to prepare for such an eventuality--but none of that made the decision any easier.

  "They want us out."

  "How far out?" asked Eli Lavon.

  "France."

  "What are we supposed to do in France? Light candles? Keep our fingers crossed?"

  "We're supposed to not get arrested by the Swiss police."

  "Well, I'm not leaving here without Zoe and Mikhail," Lavon said. "And I don't think any of the others will agree to leave, either."

  "They don't have a choice. London has spoken."

  "Since when have you ever listened to Uzi?"

  "The order didn't come from Uzi."

  "Shamron?"

  Gabriel nodded.

  "I assume the order applies to you as well."

  "Of course."

  "And is it your intention to disregard it?"

  "Absolutely."

  "I thought that would be your answer."

  "I recruited her, Eli. I trained her and I sent her in there. And there's no way I'm going to let her end up like Rafael Bloch."

  Lavon could see there was no use arguing the point. "You know, Gabriel, none of this would have happened if I'd stopped you from going to Argentina. You'd be watching the sunset in Cornwall tonight with your pretty young wife instead of presiding over another deathwatch in yet another godforsaken hotel room."

  "If I hadn't gone to Argentina, we would have never discovered that Saint Martin Landesmann built his empire upon the looted wealth of the Holocaust. And we would have never discovered that Martin was compounding his sins by doing business with a regime that talks openly about carrying out a second Holocaust."

  "All the more reason you should have an old friend watching your back tonight."

  "My old friend has been ordered to evacuate. Besides, I've given him enough gray hairs for two lifetimes."

  Lavon managed a fleeting smile. "Just do me a favor, Gabriel. Martin may have managed to beat us tonight. But whatever you do, don't give him an opportunity to run up the score. I'd hate to lose my only brother over a shipload of centrifuges."