Daniel Silva's Gabriel Allon Series Page 8

  He climbed the stairs to his studio, switched on the fluorescent lamp, gazed at the painting. God, how long had he been at it already? Six months? Seven? Vecellio had probably completed the altarpiece in a matter of weeks. It would take Gabriel ten times that long to repair it.

  He thought of everything he had done so far. Two weeks studying Vecellio himself. Life, influences, techniques. A month analyzing The Adoration of the Shepherds with several pieces of high-tech equipment: the Wild microscope to view the surface, X-ray photography to peer below the surface, ultraviolet light to expose previous retouching. After the assessment, four months removing the dirty, yellowed varnish. It was not like stripping a coffee table; it was tedious, time-consuming work. Gabriel first had to create the perfect solvent, one that would dissolve the varnish but leave the paint intact. He would dip a homemade cotton swab into the solvent and then twirl it over the surface of the painting until it became soiled with dirty varnish. Then make another swab and start all over again. Dip . . . twirl . . . discard. Dip . . . twirl . . . discard. Like swabbing the deck of a battleship with a toothbrush. On a good day he could remove a few square inches of dirty varnish.

  Now he had begun the final phase of the job: retouching those portions of the altarpiece damaged or destroyed over the centuries. It was mind-bending, meticulous work, requiring him to spend several hours each night with his face pressed against the painting, magnifying glasses over his eyes. His goal was to make the retouching invisible to the naked eye. The brush strokes, colors, and texture all had to match the original. If the surrounding paint was cracked, Gabriel painted false cracks into his retouching. If the artist had created a unique shade of lapis lazuli blue, Gabriel might spend several hours mixing pigment on his palette trying to duplicate it. His mission was to come and go without being seen. To leave the painting as he had found it, but restored to its original glory, cleansed of impurity.

  He needed sleep, but he needed time with the Vecellio more. Shamron had wakened his emotions, sharpened his senses. He knew it would be good for his work. He switched on the stereo, waited for the music to begin, then slipped his Binomags on his head and picked up his palette as the first notes of La Bohème washed over him. He placed a small amount of Mowolith 20 on the palette, added a bit of dry pigment, thinned down the mixture with arcosolve until the consistency felt right. A portion of the Virgin’s cheek had flaked away. Gabriel had been struggling to repair the damage for more than a week. He touched his brush to the paint, lowered the magnifying visor on the Binomags, and gently tapped the tip of the brush against the surface of the painting, carefully imitating Vecellio’s brush strokes. Soon he was completely lost in the work and the Puccini.

  After two hours Gabriel had retouched an area about half the size of the button on his shirt. He lifted the visor on the Binomags and rubbed his eyes. He prepared more paint on his palette and started in again.

  After another hour Shamron intruded on his thoughts.

  It was Tariq who killed the ambassador and his wife in Paris.

  If it wasn’t for the old man, Gabriel would never have become an art restorer. Shamron had wanted an airtight cover, something that would allow Gabriel to live and travel legitimately in Europe. Gabriel had been a gifted painter—he had studied art at a prestigious institute in Tel Aviv and had spent a year studying in Paris—so Shamron sent him to Venice to study restoration. When he had finished his apprenticeship, Shamron had recruited Julian Isherwood to find him work. If Shamron needed to send Gabriel to Geneva, Isherwood used his connections to find Gabriel a painting to restore. Most of the work was for private collections, but sometimes he did work for small museums and for other dealers. Gabriel was so talented he quickly became one of the most sought-after art restorers in the world.

  At 2:00 A.M. the Virgin’s face blurred before Gabriel’s eyes. His neck felt as though it were on fire. He pushed back the visor, scraped the paint from his palette, put away his things. Then he went downstairs and fell into his bed, still clothed, and tried to sleep. It was no good. Shamron was back in his head.

  It was Tariq who made the Seine run red with the blood of my people.

  Gabriel opened his eyes. Slowly, bit by bit, layer by layer, it all came back, as though it were depicted in some obscene fresco painted on the ceiling of his cottage: the day Shamron recruited him, his training at the Academy, the Black September operation, Tunis, Vienna. . . . He could almost hear the crazy Hebrew-based lexicon of the place: kidon, katsa, sayan, bodel, bat leveyha.

  We all leave behind bits of loose thread. Old operations, old enemies. They pull at you, like memories of old lovers.

  Damn you, Shamron, thought Gabriel. Find someone else.

  At dawn he swung his feet to the floor, climbed out of bed, and stood in front of the window. The sky was low and dark and filled with swirling rain. Beyond the quay, in the choppy water off the stern of the ketch, a flotilla of seagulls quarreled noisily. Gabriel went into the kitchen and fixed coffee.

  Shamron had left behind a file: ordinary manila folder, no label, a Rorschach-test coffee stain on the back cover next to a cometlike smear of cigarette ash. Gabriel opened it slowly, as if he feared it might explode, and gently lifted it to his nose—the file room at Research, yes, that was it. Attached to the inside of the front cover was a list of every officer who had ever checked out the file. They were all Office pseudonyms and meant nothing to him—except for the last name: Rom, the internal code name for the chief of the service. He turned the first page and looked at the name of the subject, then flipped through a series of grainy surveillance photographs.

  He read it once quickly, then poured himself more coffee and read it again more slowly. He had the strange sensation of walking through the rooms of his childhood—everything was familiar but slightly different, a bit smaller than he remembered, a bit shabbier perhaps. As always he was struck by the similarities between the craft of restoration and the craft of killing. The methodology was precisely the same: study the target, become like him, do the job, slip away without a trace. He might have been reading a scholarly piece on Francesco Vecellio instead of an Office case file on a terrorist named Yusef al-Tawfiki.

  Maybe if you help me take down Tariq, you can finally let go of Leah and get on with your life.

  When he had finished it a second time, he opened the cabinet below the sink and removed a stainless steel case. Inside was a gun: a Beretta .22-caliber semiautomatic, specially fitted with a competition-length barrel. The Office weapon of choice for assassinations—quiet, rapid, reliable. Gabriel pressed the release and thumbed the eight cartridges into the magazine. The rounds contained a light power loading, which made the Beretta fire extremely quietly. When Gabriel had killed the Black September operative in Rome, the neighbors mistook the lethal shots for firecrackers. He rammed the magazine into the grip and pulled the slide, chambering the first round. He had fine-tuned the spring in the blowback mechanism to compensate for the light power in the cartridges. He raised the weapon and peered through the sights. An image appeared before his eyes: pale olive skin, soft brown eyes, cropped black hair.

  It was Tariq who made the Seine run red with the blood of my people. Tariq—your old friend.

  Gabriel lowered the gun, closed the file, pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. He had made himself a promise after the disaster in Vienna. He would leave the Office for good: no return engagements, no trips down memory lane, no contact with headquarters, period. He would restore his paintings and match wits with the sea and try to forget that Vienna ever happened. He had seen too many old-timers get pulled in whenever the Office had a lousy job and no one to do it—too many men who could never quite leave the secret world behind.

  But what if it were true? What if the boy could actually lead him to Tariq?

  Maybe if you help me take down Tariq, you can forgive yourself for what happened in Vienna.

  By instinct he drifted upstairs to his studio and stood before the Vecellio, inspecting that ev
ening’s work. He approved. At least something good had come of Shamron’s visit. He felt a pang of regret. If he went to work for Shamron, he would have to leave the Vecellio behind. He would be a stranger to the painting when he got back. It would be like starting over. And the Rembrandt? The Rembrandt he would return to Christie’s, with his deepest professional apologies. But not the Vecellio. He had invested too much time—put too much of himself into it—to let anyone else touch it now. It was his painting. Julian would just have to wait.

  He slipped downstairs, extinguished the gas fire, packed away his Beretta, slipped Shamron’s file into a drawer. As he stepped outside, a gust of wet wind rocked him onto his heels. The air was oppressively cold, the rain on his face like pellets. He felt as though he were being pulled from a warm, safe place. The halyards snapped against the mast of his ketch. The gulls lifted from the surface of the river, screamed in unison, turned toward the sea, white wings beating against the gray of the clouds. Gabriel pulled his hood over his head and started walking.

  Outside the village store was a public telephone. Gabriel dialed the number for the Savoy Hotel and asked to be connected to the room of Rudolf Heller. He always pictured Shamron in portrait over the telephone: the creviced face, the leather hands, the afflicted expression, a patch of bare canvas over the spot where his heart might be. When Shamron answered, the two men exchanged pleasantries in German for a moment, then switched to English. Gabriel always assumed telephone lines were monitored, so when he spoke to Shamron about the operation, he used a crude code. “A project like this will require a large amount of capital. I’ll need money for personnel, transportation, office space, apartment rentals, petty cash for unexpected expenses.”

  “I assure you, capital will not be a problem.”

  Gabriel raised the issue of Lev and how to keep the operation secret from him. “But if memory serves, the bank where you have obtained financing for such ventures in the past is now under the control of your competitors. If you approach the bank for financing now, you run the risk of alerting the competition to our intentions.”

  “Actually, I have another source of capital that will permit me to raise the money for the project without the knowledge of the competition.”

  “If I accept your proposal, I would demand complete authority to run the venture as I see fit. Keeping the project secret from the competition will require the use of independent contractors and other freelance personnel. These people cost money. I will require the independent authority to spend money and use resources as I deem necessary.”

  “You have it, though overall operational control of the venture will remain with me in Geneva.”

  “Agreed. Then there is the matter of my own compensation.”

  “I’m afraid you are in a position to name your own price.”

  “One hundred and fifty thousand pounds. If the job lasts longer than six months, I will be paid an additional one hundred thousand pounds.”

  “Done. So, do we have an agreement?”

  “I’ll let you know by the end of the day.”

  But it was Peel, not Shamron, who received the news first.

  Late that afternoon Peel heard noises on the quay. He raised his head from his schoolwork and peered out the window. There, in the dying twilight, he saw the stranger on the deck of his ketch, dressed in his yellow oilskin and a black woolen watch cap pulled so low that Peel could barely see his eyes. He was putting the ketch in mothballs: taking down sails, removing aerials, locking hatch covers. There was a look of grim determination on his face that Peel had never seen before. He considered running down to see if there was something wrong, but the stranger’s demeanor suggested he was in no mood for visitors.

  After an hour the stranger disappeared into the cottage. Peel returned to his schoolwork, only to be interrupted again a few minutes later, this time by the sound of the stranger’s MG starting up. Peel rushed to the window in time to see the car rolling slowly up the lane, rain drifting through the beams of the headlights. He lifted his hand, more a gesture of surrender than a wave. For a moment he thought the stranger didn’t see him. Then the headlights flashed once and the little MG vanished.

  Peel waited in the window until the sound of the motor died away. A tear spilled down his cheek. He punched it away. Big boys don’t cry, he told himself. The stranger would never cry for me. I won’t cry for him. Downstairs his mother and Derek were quarreling again. Peel climbed into bed and pulled his pillow around his ears.

  9

  HOLBORN, LONDON

  Looking Glass Communications, a multibillion-dollar international publishing conglomerate, was headquartered in a modern office building overlooking New Square. It was owned by a six-foot-eight-inch, three-hundred-pound tyrant named Benjamin Stone. From his luxuriously appointed penthouse atop the headquarters, Stone ruled an empire of companies stretching from the Middle East to the United States. He owned dozens of newspapers and magazines as well as a controlling stake in the venerable New York publishing house Horton & McLawson. But the jewel in Stone’s crown was the tabloid Daily Sentinel, Britain’s third-largest-selling national newspaper. Among the journalists of Fleet Street, the Daily Sentinel was known as the Daily Stone, because it was not unusual for the paper to publish two stories in a single day about Stone’s business and philanthropic activities.

  What his competitors did not know was that Stone, a Hungarian Jew by birth, was also Ari Shamron’s most valuable sayan. When Shamron needed to insert a katsa into a hostile country on short notice, he could turn to Stone and the Daily Sentinel for cover. When a disgruntled former katsa tried to peddle a tell-all book about the Office, Shamron turned to Stone and his New York publishing house to knock it down. When Shamron wanted to plant a story in the Western press, he simply had to pick up a telephone and whisper into Benjamin Stone’s ear.

  But Stone’s most valuable contribution to the Office was money. Among the senior staff at King Saul Boulevard, his charitable instincts had earned him the nickname Hadassah. Indeed, money looted from the pension funds of Stone’s companies had been used to bankroll Office operations for years. Whenever Shamron needed funds, Stone moved money through a series of dummy corporations and shell companies into one of Shamron’s operational accounts in Geneva.

  Stone greeted Shamron that evening in the garish entrance hall. “Fuck’s sake!” he roared in his trademark baritone bellow. “Rudolf, my love! Didn’t realize you were in town. Why didn’t you tell me you were coming? I would have arranged something suitable. A banquet. A human sacrifice.” Stone laid his huge paw on Shamron’s shoulder. “Treasonous bastard! You’re lucky I’m here. Marvelous! Sensational! Come. Sit. Eat. Drink.”

  Stone pulled Shamron into the sitting room. Everything was oversized, to accommodate Stone’s mass: deep chairs and couches of hand-tooled leather, a thick red carpet, large ottomans, and broad, low tables covered with fresh flowers and expensive trinkets given to him by other rich men. Stone forced Shamron into a chair as if he were about to interrogate him. He strode to the window, pressed a button, and the heavy curtains drew back. A window washer was working on the other side of the glass. Stone rapped his fat knuckle against the glass and gave the window washer a karate chop of a wave.

  “I am the lord and master of all you see, Herr Heller,” Stone announced, admiring his view. “This man washes my window every day. Can’t stand a dirty window. Can you? If I ordered him to jump he’d do it and thank me for the suggestion later. Wouldn’t do it out of loyalty. Or respect. Or love. He’d do it because he’d be afraid not to. Fear is the only emotion that really matters.”

  The window washer finished quickly and rappelled down the building. Stone lumbered across the room and opened the refrigerator behind the bar. He pulled out two bottles of champagne—he never opened just one—and slammed the door shut again as though he were kneeing a competitor in the balls. He tried to open one of the bottles, but his thick fingers were ill designed for the task of peeling foil and twisting bits of wir
e. Finally he threw back his head and roared, “Angelina!”

  A terrified Portuguese maid entered the room, her eyes slightly averted.

  “Take these,” Stone commanded, holding the bottles by the necks as though he were strangling them. “Remove the corks, bury them in ice. Bring food, Angelina. Mounds of food. Caviar, smoked salmon, and don’t forget strawberries. Big fucking strawberries. Big as a teenage girl’s titties.”

  Stone fell into the corner of a couch and put his feet up on an ottoman. He removed his tie, twirled it into a ball, and tossed it over his shoulder onto the floor. He wore a striped shirt, handmade from Egyptian cotton, and maroon suspenders. The gold cuff links were nearly as big as the face on his solid gold wristwatch. Angelina came back into the room, deposited the tray of food, and fled. Stone poured champagne into flutes the size of beer glasses. He grasped a plum-sized strawberry, dipped it into the wine, and devoured it. He seemed to swallow it whole. Shamron suddenly felt like Alice. Everything was too big: the glasses, the strawberries, the slabs of smoked salmon, the giant-screen television silently playing an American financial news network, Stone and his ludicrous voice.

  “May we drop the pretenses, Herr Heller?”

  Shamron nodded. A technician from the Office’s London station had swept the apartment earlier that evening and found no listening devices.

  “Ari, my friend!”

  Stone plunged a toast point into a bowl of caviar. Shamron watched as three hundred dollars’ worth of beluga vanished down Stone’s gullet. For twenty minutes he treated Shamron to tales of his business ventures, his charitable activities, his most recent meeting with the Prince of Wales, his active and diverse sex life. He paused only once to scream for Angelina to bring another vat of caviar. Shamron sat with his legs crossed, watching the bubbles rise in his champagne. Occasionally he murmured, “How interesting,” or “That’s fascinating.”