The Black Widow Page 4

  They call him Saladin . . .

  Mikhail stretched out on the bed, his back propped against the headboard, the gun at his side, and stared at the shadowy mass of his fortifications. It was, he thought, a truly undignified sight. He switched on the television and surfed the airwaves of a Middle East gone mad until boredom drove him toward the doorstep of sleep. To keep himself alert he guzzled a cola from the fridge bar and thought about a woman he had foolishly let slip through his fingers. She was a beautiful American of flawless Protestant pedigree who had worked for the CIA and, occasionally, for the Office. She was living in New York now, where she oversaw a special collection of paintings at the Museum of Modern Art. He’d heard she was seeing a man quite seriously, a bond trader, of all things. He contemplated calling her, just to hear the sound of her voice, but decided it would be unwise. Like Russia, she was lost to him.

  What’s his real name, Clovis?

  I’m not sure he ever had one.

  Where’s he from?

  He might have been from Iraq once, but now he’s a son of the caliphate . . .

  Finally, the sky beyond Mikhail’s window turned blue-black with the coming dawn. He put his room in order and thirty minutes later slumped bleary-eyed into the back of Sami Haddad’s car.

  “How did it go?” asked the Lebanese.

  “Total waste of time,” replied Mikhail through an elaborate yawn.

  “Where now?”

  “Tel Aviv.”

  “It’s not such an easy drive, my friend.”

  “Then perhaps you should take me to the airport instead.”

  His flight was at half past eight. He sailed through passport control as a smiling, somewhat drowsy Canadian and settled into his first-class seat aboard a Middle East Airlines jet bound for Rome. To shield himself from his neighbor, a Turkish salesman of disreputable appearance, he pretended to read the morning papers. In reality, he was considering all the possible reasons why an aircraft operated by the government of Lebanon might fail to reach its destination safely. For once, he thought glumly, his death would have consequences, for the intelligence would die with him.

  How much money are we talking about, Clovis?

  Four million, maybe five.

  Which is it?

  Closer to five . . .

  The plane landed in Rome without incident, though it took Mikhail the better part of two hours to clear the organized stampede that was Fiumicino’s passport control. His stay in Italy was brief, long enough for him to switch identities and board another airplane, an El Al flight bound for Tel Aviv. An Office car waited at Ben Gurion; it whisked him north to King Saul Boulevard. The building at the western end of the street was, like Paul Rousseau’s outpost on the rue de Grenelle, a lie in plain sight. 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.

  Like most field agents, Mikhail entered the building through the underground parking garage and then made his way upward to the executive floor. Because the hour was late—the security cameras recorded the time as half past nine—the corridor was as quiet as a school that had been emptied of children. From the half-open door at the end of the hall stretched a slender rhombus of light. Mikhail knocked softly and, hearing no reply, entered. Stuffed into an executive leather chair behind a desk of smoked glass was Uzi Navot, the soon-to-be former chief of the Office. He was frowning at an open file as though it were a bill he could not afford to pay. At his elbow was an open box of Viennese butter cookies. Only two remained, not a good sign.

  At length, Navot looked up and with a dismissive movement of his hand instructed Mikhail to sit. He wore a striped dress shirt that had been cut for a thinner man and a pair of the rimless spectacles beloved by German intellectuals and Swiss bankers. His hair, once strawberry blond, was gray stubble; his blue eyes were bloodshot. He rolled up his shirtsleeves, exposing his massive forearms, and contemplated Mikhail for a long moment with thinly veiled hostility. It wasn’t the reception Mikhail had expected, but then one never knew quite what to expect when one encountered Uzi Navot these days. There were rumors his successor intended to keep him on in some capacity—blasphemy in a service that regarded regular turnover at the top almost as a matter of religious doctrine—but officially his future was unclear.

  “Any problems on the way out of Beirut?” Navot asked at last, as though the question had occurred to him suddenly.

  “None,” answered Mikhail.

  Navot snared a stray cookie crumb with the tip of a thick forefinger. “Surveillance?”

  “Nothing we could see.”

  “And the man who rode the hotel elevator with you? Did you ever see him again?”

  “At the roof bar.”

  “Anything suspicious?”

  “Everyone in Beirut looks suspicious. That’s why it’s Beirut.”

  Navot flicked the cookie crumb onto the plate. Then he removed a photograph from the file and dealt it across the desktop toward Mikhail. It showed a man sitting in the front seat of a luxury automobile, at the edge of a seaside boulevard. The windows of the car were shattered. The man was a bloody tattered mess, and quite obviously dead.

  “Recognize him?” asked Navot.

  Mikhail squinted in concentration.

  “Look carefully at the car.”

  Mikhail did. And then he understood. The dead man was Sami Haddad.

  “When did they get him?”

  “Not long after he dropped you at the airport. And they were just getting started.”

  Navot spun another photo across the desk, a ruined building on an elegant street in downtown Beirut. It was Gallerie Mansour on the rue Madame Curie. Limbs and heads littered the pavement. For once the carnage wasn’t human. It was Clovis Mansour’s magnificent professional inventory.

  “I was hoping,” Navot resumed after a moment, “that my last days as chief would pass without incident. Instead, I have to deal with the loss of our best contract employee in Beirut and an asset we spent a great deal of time and effort recruiting.”

  “Better than a dead field agent.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.” Navot accepted the two photographs and returned them to the file. “What did Mansour have for you?”

  “The man who was behind Paris.”

  “Who is he?”

  “They call him Saladin.”

  “Saladin? Well,” Navot said, closing the file, “at least that’s a start.”

  Navot remained in his office long after Mikhail had taken his leave. The desk was empty except for his leather-bound executive notepad, on which he had scrawled a single word. Saladin . . . Only a man of great self-esteem would grant himself a code name like that, only a man of great ambition. The real Saladin had united the Muslim world under the Ayyubid dynasty and recaptured Jerusalem from the Crusaders. Perhaps this new Saladin was similarly inclined. For his coming-out party he had flattened a Jewish target in the middle of Paris, thus attacking two countries, two civilizations, at the same time. Surely, thought Navot, the success of the attack had only whetted his lust for infidel blood. It was only a matter of time before he struck again.

  For the moment, Saladin was a French problem. But the fact that four Israeli citizens had perished in the attack gave Navot standing in Paris. So, too, did the name that Clovis Mansour had whispered into Mikhail’s ear in Beirut. In fact, with a bit of skilled salesmanship, the name alone might be enough to secure the Office a seat at the operational ta
ble. Navot was confident in his powers of persuasion. A former field agent and recruiter of spies, he had the ability to spin straw into gold. All he needed was someone to look after the Office’s interest in any joint Franco-Israeli undertaking. He had but one candidate in mind, a legendary field agent who had been running operations on French soil since he was a boy of twenty-two. What’s more, the operative in question had known Hannah Weinberg personally. Unfortunately, the prime minister had other plans for him.

  Navot checked the time; it was ten fifteen. He reached for his phone and dialed Travel.

  “I need to fly to Paris tomorrow morning.”

  “The six o’clock or the nine?”

  “The six,” said Navot despondently.

  “When are you coming back?”

  “Tomorrow night.”

  “Done.”

  Navot rang off and then placed a final call. The question he posed was one he had asked many times before.

  “How long before he’s finished?”

  “He’s close.”

  “How close?”

  “Maybe tonight, tomorrow at the latest.”

  Navot replaced the receiver and allowed his gaze to wander the spacious office that soon would no longer be his.

  Tomorrow at the latest . . .

  Maybe, he thought, or maybe not.

  5

  ISRAEL MUSEUM, JERUSALEM

  IN THE FAR CORNER OF the conservation lab, a black curtain stretched from the white ceiling to the white floor. Behind it was a matching pair of oaken Italian easels, two halogen lamps, a Nikon camera mounted atop a tripod, a palette, a tiny bale of cotton wool, an ancient CD player smudged with several different colors of paint, and a trolley laden with pigments, medium, solvents, wooden dowels, and several Winsor & Newton Series 7 sable-hair paintbrushes. For the better part of the past four months, the restorer had labored there alone, sometimes late at night, sometimes long before dawn. He wore no museum credentials, for his true place of employment was elsewhere. The staff conservators had been advised not to mention his presence or even to speak his name. Nor were they to discuss the large painting, an Italian Old Master altarpiece, propped upon his easels. The painting, like the restorer, had a dangerous and tragic past.

  He was below average in height—five foot eight, perhaps, no more—and slender of build. His face was high at the forehead and narrow at the chin, with wide prominent cheekbones and a long, bony nose that looked as though it had been carved from wood. The dark hair was cropped short and stained with gray at the temples, the eyes were an unnatural shade of green. His age was one of the most closely guarded secrets in Israel. Not long ago, when his obituary appeared in newspapers around the world, no verifiable date of birth ever found its way into print. The reports of his death had been part of an elaborate operation to deceive his enemies in Moscow and Tehran. They had believed the stories to be true, a miscalculation that allowed the restorer to take vengeance against them. Not long after his return to Jerusalem, his wife gave birth to a set of twins, a girl named Irene after his mother, and a son called Raphael. They were now—mother, daughter, son—three of the most closely guarded people in the State of Israel. So, too, was the restorer. He came and went in an armored American-made SUV, accompanied by a bodyguard, a fawn-eyed killer of twenty-five, who sat outside the door of the conservation lab whenever he was present.

  His appearance at the museum, on a black and wet Wednesday in December a few days after the birth of his children, had come as a shock, and a profound relief, to the rest of the conservation staff. They had been warned he did not like to be observed while working. Still, they routinely poked their heads into his little curtained grotto merely to glimpse the altarpiece with their own eyes. Truth be told, he couldn’t blame them. The painting, Caravaggio’s Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence, was arguably the world’s most famous missing work of art. Stolen from the Oratorio di San Lorenzo in Palermo in October 1969, it was now formally in the possession of the Vatican. The Holy See had wisely decided to withhold news of the painting’s recovery until the restoration was complete. Like many Vatican pronouncements, the official version of events would bear little resemblance to the truth. It would not mention the fact that a legendary Israeli intelligence officer named Gabriel Allon had found the missing painting hanging in a church in the northern Italian town of Brienno. Nor would it mention that the same legendary intelligence officer had been entrusted with the task of restoring it.

  During his long career he had carried out several unusual restorations—he had once repaired a Rembrandt portrait that had been pierced by a bullet—but the Caravaggio altarpiece propped upon Gabriel’s easels was without question the most damaged canvas he had ever seen. Little was known of its long journey from the Oratorio di San Lorenzo to the church where he had found it. The stories, however, were legion. It had been kept by a Mafia don as a prize and brought out for important meetings of his henchmen. It had been chewed by rats, damaged in a flood, and burned in a fire. Gabriel was certain of only one thing: the painting’s wounds, while grievous, were not fatal. But Ephraim Cohen, the museum’s chief of conservation, was dubious. Upon seeing the painting for the first time, he advised Gabriel to administer last rites and return the altarpiece to the Vatican in the same wooden coffin in which it had arrived.

  “Ye of little faith,” Gabriel had said.

  “No,” replied Cohen. “Me of limited talent.”

  Cohen, like the other members of the staff, had heard the stories—the stories of deadlines missed, of commissions abandoned, of church reopenings delayed. The snail-like pace of Gabriel’s work habits was legendary, almost as legendary as his exploits on the secret battlefields of Europe and the Middle East. But they soon discovered that his slowness was voluntary rather than instinctive. The craft of restoration, he explained to Cohen one evening while swiftly repairing the tattered face of Saint Francis, was a bit like making love. It was best done slowly and with painstaking attention to detail, with occasional breaks for rest and refreshment. But in a pinch, if the craftsman and his subject matter were adequately acquainted, a restoration could be done at extraordinary speed, with more or less the same result.

  “You and Caravaggio are old friends?” asked Cohen.

  “We’ve collaborated in the past.”

  “So the rumors are true then?”

  Gabriel had been painting with his right hand. Now he moved the brush to his left and worked with equal dexterity.

  “What rumors are those?” he asked after a moment.

  “That you were the one who restored the Deposition for the Vatican Museums a few years ago.”

  “You should never listen to rumors, Ephraim, especially when they concern me.”

  “Or the news,” said Cohen darkly.

  His hours were erratic and unpredictable. An entire day might pass with no sign of him. Then Cohen would arrive at the museum to find a large portion of the canvas miraculously restored. Surely, he thought, he had a secret helper. Or perhaps Caravaggio himself was stealing into the museum at night, a sword in one hand, a brush in the other, to assist with the work. After one nocturnal session—a particularly productive visit during which the Virgin was returned to her former glory—Cohen actually checked the security footage. He found that Gabriel had entered the lab at half past ten in the evening and had departed at seven twenty the next morning. Not even the fawn-eyed bodyguard had been with him. Perhaps it was true, thought Cohen, as he watched the ghostly figure moving at one frame per second along a half-lit hall. Perhaps he was an archangel after all.

  When he was present during normal business hours, there was always music. La Bohème was a particular favorite. Indeed, he played it so often that Cohen, who spoke not a word of Italian, could soon sing “Che gelida manina” from memory. Once Gabriel entered his curtained grotto, he never reappeared until the session was complete. There were no strolls in the museum’s sculpture garden to clear his head, no trips to the staff lunchroom for a jolt of caffein
e. Only the music, and the soft tap-tap-tap of his brush, and the occasional click of his Nikon camera as he recorded his relentless progress. Before leaving the laboratory he would clean his brushes and his palette and put his trolley in order—precisely, noted Cohen, so he would be able to detect whether anyone touched his things in his absence. Then the music would go silent, the halogen lamps would dim, and with little more than a cordial nod to the others he would be gone.

  By early April, with the winter rains a memory and the days warm and bright, he was hurling himself headlong toward a finish line only he could see. All that remained was the winged angel of the Lord, an ivory-skinned boy who floated in the upper reaches of the composition. It was a curious choice to leave for last, thought Cohen, for the boy angel had suffered serious injury. His limbs were scarred by heavy paint losses, his white garment was in tatters. Only his right hand, which was pointed heavenward, was undamaged. Gabriel restored the angel in a series of marathon sessions. They were noteworthy for their silence—there was no music during this period—and for the fact that, as he was repairing the angel’s auburn hair, a large bomb exploded in Paris. He stood for a long time before the lab’s small television, his palette slowly drying, watching as the bodies were pulled from the rubble. And when a photograph of a woman named Hannah Weinberg appeared on the screen, he flinched as though struck by an invisible blow. Afterward, his expression darkened and his green eyes seemed to burn with anger. Cohen was tempted to ask the legend whether he had known the woman, but decided against it. One could talk to him about paintings and the weather, but when bombs exploded it was probably better to keep one’s distance.

  On the last day, the day of Uzi Navot’s journey to Paris, Gabriel arrived at the lab before dawn and remained in his little grotto long after the museum had closed for the night. Ephraim Cohen found an excuse to stay late because he sensed the end was near and wanted to be present to witness it. Shortly after eight o’clock he heard the familiar sound of the legend laying his brush—a Winsor & Newton Series 7—on the aluminum tray of his trolley. Cohen peered furtively through the slender gap in the curtain and saw him standing before the canvas, a hand resting against his chin, his head tilted slightly to the side. He remained in the same position, motionless as the figures in the painting, until the fawn-eyed bodyguard entered the lab and pressed a mobile phone urgently into his palm. Reluctantly, he lifted it to his ear, listened in silence, and murmured something Cohen couldn’t quite make out. A moment later both he and the bodyguard were gone.