The Rembrandt Affair (33 page)

78

WASHINGTON, D.C.

B
y the time Gabriel and Chiara arrived in America, their silent but demanding houseguest of three months was an international sensation. Her celebrity was not instant; it was rooted in an affair she'd had four hundred years earlier with a painter named Rembrandt and by the long and tragic road she had traveled ever since. Once upon a time, she would have been forced to live out her days in shame. Now they were lining up for tickets just to have a glimpse of her.

In an era when museums had been scorched repeatedly by provenance scandals, the director of the National Gallery of Art had felt compelled to reveal much of her sordid past. She had been sold in Amsterdam in 1936 to a man named Abraham Herzfeld, acquired by coercion in 1943 by an SS officer named Kurt Voss, and sold twenty-one years later in a private transaction conducted by the Hoffmann Gallery of Lucerne. At the request of the White House, the National Gallery never revealed the name of the Zurich bank where she had been hidden for several years, nor was there any mention of the document once hidden inside her. Her links to a looted Holocaust fortune had been carefully erased, just like the bullet hole in her forehead and the blood that had stained her garment. No one named Landesmann had ever laid hands on her. No one named Landesmann had ever killed to protect her terrible secret.

Her scandalous past did nothing to tarnish her reception. In fact, it only added to her allure. There was no escaping her face in Washington. She stared from billboards and buses, from souvenir shirts and coffee mugs, and even from a hot-air balloon that floated over the city the day before her unveiling. Gabriel and Chiara saw her for the first time minutes after stepping off their plane at Dulles Airport, gazing at them disapprovingly from an advertisement as they glided through customs on false passports. They saw her again peering from a giant banner as they hurried up the steps of the museum through an evening thunderstorm, this time as if urging them to quicken their pace. Uncharacteristically, they were running late. The fault was entirely Gabriel's. After years of toiling in the shadows of the art world, he'd had serious misgivings about stepping onto so public a stage, even clandestinely.

The exhibition opening was a formal, invitation-only affair. Even so, all guests had to have their possessions searched, a policy instituted at the gallery immediately after the attacks of 9/11. Julian Isherwood was waiting just beyond the checkpoint beneath the soaring main rotunda, gazing nervously at his wristwatch. Seeing Gabriel and Chiara, he made a theatrical gesture of relief. Then, looking at Gabriel's clothing, he tried unsuccessfully to conceal a smile.

"I never thought I would live to see the day you put on a tuxedo."

"Neither did I, Julian. And if you make any more cracks--"

Chiara silenced Gabriel with a discreet elbow to the ribs. "If it would be at all possible, I'd like to get through the evening without you threatening to kill anyone."

Gabriel frowned. "If it wasn't for me, Julian would be trying to scrounge up forty-five million dollars right now. The least he can do is show me a modicum of respect."

"There'll be plenty of time for that later," Isherwood said. "But right now there are two people who are very anxious to see you."

"Where are they?"

"Upstairs."

"In separate rooms, I hope?"

Isherwood nodded gravely. "Just as you requested."

"Let's go."

Isherwood led them across the rotunda through a sea of tuxedos and gowns, then up several flights of wide marble steps. A security guard admitted them into the administrative area of the museum and directed them to a waiting room at the end of a long carpeted hallway. The door was closed; Gabriel started to turn the latch but hesitated.

She's fragile. They're all a bit fragile
...

He knocked lightly. Lena Herzfeld, child of the attic, child of darkness, said, "Come in."

S
HE WAS SEATED
ramrod straight at the center of a leather couch, knees together, hands in her lap. They were clutching the official program of the exhibition, which was wrinkled and wet with her tears. Gabriel and Chiara sat on either side of her and held her tightly while she wept. After several minutes, she looked at Gabriel and touched his cheek.

"What shall I call you tonight? Are you Mr. Argov or Mr. Allon?"

"Please call me Gabriel."

She smiled briefly, then looked down at the program.

"I'm still amazed you were actually able to find her after all these years."

"We would never have been able to do it without the help of Kurt Voss's son."

"I'm glad he came tonight. Where is he?"

"Just down the hall. If you wouldn't mind, he'd like to have a word with you in private before the unveiling. He wants to apologize for what his father did."

"It wasn't his crime, Gabriel. And his apology won't bring my sister back."

"But it might help to hear it." Gabriel held her hand. "You've punished yourself long enough, Lena. It's time for you to let someone else bear the guilt for your family's murder."

Tears spilled onto her cheeks, though she emitted not a sound. Finally, she composed herself and nodded. "I'll listen to his apology. But I will not cry in front of him."

"There's something I need to warn you about, Lena."

"He looks like this father?"

"An older version," Gabriel said. "But the resemblance is striking."

"Then I suppose God decided to punish him, too." She shook her head slowly. "To live with the face of a murderer? I cannot imagine."

F
OR
P
ETER
V
OSS'S
sake, Lena managed to conceal her shock when seeing him for the first time, though controlling her tears proved impossible. Gabriel remained in the room with them only a moment, then slipped into the corridor to wait with Chiara and Isherwood. Lena emerged ten minutes later, eyes raw, but looking remarkably composed. Gabriel took her hand and said there was one more person who wanted to see her.

P
ORTRAIT OF A
Y
OUNG
W
OMAN,
oil on canvas, 104 by 86 centimeters, by Rembrandt van Rijn, was propped on an easel in a small holding room, covered by baize cloth, surrounded by several security guards and a nervous-looking curator. Chiara held Lena by the arm while Gabriel and Isherwood carefully removed the cover.

"She looks more beautiful than I remember."

"It's not too late to change your mind, Lena. If you don't want to give her up permanently, Julian can alter the terms of the contract so it's only a temporary loan."

"No," she said after a pause. "I can't care for her, not at my age. She'll be happier here."

"You're sure?" Gabriel pressed.

"I'm sure." Lena looked at the painting. "You put a prayer to my sister inside it?"

"Here," said Chiara, pointing to the center of the bottom portion of the frame.

"It will stay with her always?"

"The museum has promised to keep it there forever," said Gabriel.

Lena took a hesitant step forward. "I was never able to say good-bye to her that night in Amsterdam. There wasn't time." She looked at Gabriel. "May I touch her? One final time?"

"Carefully," said Gabriel.

Lena reached out and traced her finger slowly over the dark hair. Then she touched the bottom of the frame and walked silently from the room.

T
HE UNVEILING
had been scheduled for eight, but due to circumstances never explained to the guests it was closer to half past before
Portrait of a Young Woman
was carried into the rotunda, cloaked in her shroud of baize. Unexpectedly, Gabriel felt as nervous as a playwright on opening night. He found a hiding place with Isherwood and Chiara at the edge of the crowd and stared at his shoes during several long and deeply boring speeches. Finally, the lights dimmed and the covering came off to tumultuous applause. Chiara kissed his cheek and said, "They adore it, Gabriel. Look around you, darling. They don't realize it, but they're cheering for you."

Gabriel looked up but immediately managed to find the one person in the crowd who was not clapping. She was a woman in her mid-thirties with dark hair, olive-complected skin, and intoxicating green eyes that were focused directly on him. She raised a glass of champagne in his direction and mouthed the words, "Well done, Gabriel." Then she handed the glass to a passing waiter and headed toward the exit.

79

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Y
ou never told me how much I look like her," said Zoe.

"Like Hendrickje?" Gabriel shrugged. "You're much prettier than she is."

"I'm sure you say that to all the girls."

"Only the ones I place in great danger."

Zoe laughed. They were walking along the edge of the Mall, the vast dome of the Capitol floating before them, the Washington Monument rising at their backs. Paris, Greece, and Egypt, thought Gabriel, all in the space of a few hundred yards. He looked at Zoe carefully. She was wearing an elegant evening gown, similar to the one she had worn to Martin's party, and a slender strand of pearls at her throat. Despite everything she had been through, she appeared relaxed and happy. It seemed to Gabriel that the burden of deception had been lifted from her shoulders. She was Zoe before the lies. Zoe before Martin.

"I didn't realize you were planning to come."

"I wasn't," she said. "But I decided I couldn't miss it."

"How did you manage to get a ticket?"

"Membership has its privileges, darling."

"You should have let me know."

"And how might I have done that? Call you? Drop you an e-mail or a text message?" She smiled. "Do you even
have
an e-mail address?"

"Actually, I do. But it doesn't work like a normal account."

"What a surprise," said Zoe. "How about a mobile phone? Do you carry one?"

"Only under duress."

"Mine's been acting up on me. You're not doing anything funny to it, are you?"

"You're off the grid, Zoe."

"I'm not sure I'll ever think of my phone quite the same way."

"You shouldn't."

They crossed the stone esplanade separating the main building of the National Gallery from its east wing.

"Do you always bring members of your team to openings or is that gorgeous creature on your arm tonight your wife?" Zoe gave him a sideways glance and smiled. "I do believe you're blushing, Mr. Allon. If you'd like, I can teach you a few tricks of the trade to help you better conceal your emotions."

Gabriel was silent.

"Is this the part where you're going to remind me that you demand truthfulness in others while concealing yourself behind a cloak of lies?"

"I'm not at liberty to discuss my personal life, Zoe."

"So we're not all going to be friends?"

"I'm afraid it doesn't work that way."

"Too bad," she said. "I always liked her. And, for the record, when we were all in Highgate together you two did a damn lousy job of hiding the fact you're madly in love."

"There is no safe house in Highgate, Zoe."

"Ah, yes, I forgot."

Gabriel changed the subject. "You look lovely, Zoe. New York obviously agrees with you."

"I still haven't managed to find a decent cup of tea."

"No second thoughts about leaving the newspaper business?"

"There
is
no newspaper business," Zoe said acidly. "What did you think of Martin's performance at Davos?"

"I sleep easier at night knowing that Martin is optimistic about our future."

"Has he been behaving himself?"

"I hear he's been a model prisoner."

"What's going on with the centrifuges?"

"There are no centrifuges, Zoe, at least none where Martin is concerned. Martin never puts a foot wrong. He's pure of heart and noble of intent. He's a saint."

"And to think I actually fell for that bilge."

"From our point of view, we're very glad you did." Gabriel smiled and guided her toward the main building. "Have you heard from him?"

"Martin? Not a peep. But it galls me to no end that he's actually going to get away with it. After what he and Muller did to Mikhail, I wish I could bring them down myself."

"You're still covered by the Official Secrets Act, Zoe. Even here in America."

"The MI6 station in Washington reminds me of that on a regular basis." Zoe smiled and asked about Mikhail.

"From what I hear, he's like new."

"Just like the Rembrandt?"

"I doubt Mikhail needed as much work as the Rembrandt."

"Do send him my best. I'm afraid I still see his face in my dreams every night."

"It won't last forever."

"Yes," she said distantly, "that's what the MI5 psychiatrists told me."

They had reached the gallery's front entrance. Chiara and Isherwood were waiting outside with Lena Herzfeld.

"Who's the woman with your wife?"

"She's the reason we recruited you," Gabriel said.

"Lena?"

Gabriel nodded. "Would you like to meet her?"

"If it's all right with you, I'll just admire her from afar." Zoe hailed a passing taxi. "If you ever need someone to do another dangerous job, you know where to find me."

"Go back to your life."

"I'm trying to," she said, smiling. "But it's just not as bloody interesting as yours."

Zoe kissed his cheek and climbed into the taxi. As it pulled away from the curb, Gabriel felt his phone vibrating in the breast pocket of his jacket. It was an e-mail from King Saul Boulevard, just one word in length.

B
OOM...

80

THE LIZARD PENINSULA, CORNWALL

A
s with nearly every other aspect of Operation Masterpiece, deciding precisely what to do with Martin Landesmann's centrifuges was the source of a contentious internal debate. Roughly speaking, there were three options--only fitting, since the political leadership and intelligence services of three nations were involved. Options one and two involved tampering and bugging while option three imagined a far more decisive course of action. Also known as the Hammer of Shamron, it called for concealing monitoring devices in the centrifuges along with enough high explosives to blow Iran's entire secret enrichment chain to kingdom come if the opportunity presented itself. The benefits, said Shamron, were twofold. Not only would a major act of sabotage deal a severe setback to the program but it would forever make the Iranians think twice about doing their nuclear shopping in Europe.

With the White House still hoping for a negotiated settlement to the Iran issue, the Americans entered the talks in the option two camp and remained there until the end. The British also liked the "wait and watch" approach, although in their mischievous hearts they wanted to do a bit of "messing about" as well. Option three was the most controversial of the plans--hardly surprising given its source--and in the end it was supported by only one country. Because that country also happened to be the one that would forever have to live under direct threat of a nuclear-armed Iran, its vote carried more weight. "Besides," argued Shamron emphatically, "Martin is ours. We found him. We fought for him. And we bled for him. We
own
those centrifuges. And we can do with them what we please."

A centrifuge cascade is a complex facility. It is also quite fragile, as the Iranians themselves have learned the hard way. One faulty gas centrifuge, spinning at several thousand rotations a minute, can break into deadly shrapnel and blow through a facility like a tornado, destroying adjacent centrifuges along with connective piping and assemblies. Years of painstaking work can be wiped out in an instant by a single fingerprint, smudge, or some other impurity.

In fact, that is precisely what the Iranians first suspected when a calamitous explosion swept through an undisclosed enrichment facility in Yazd at 4:42 a.m. Their suspicions quickly focused on sabotage, however, when a near-simultaneous blast shredded a second undisclosed facility at Gorgan near the Caspian Sea. When reports surfaced of explosions at two other secret enrichment plants, the Iranian president ordered an emergency shutdown of all nuclear facilities, along with an evacuation of nonessential personnel. By dawn Tehran time, the Hammer of Shamron had achieved its first goal. Four previously undisclosed plants lay in ruins. And the mullahs were in a panic.

B
UT HOW TO
explain the blasts publicly without revealing the great lie that was the Iranian nuclear program? For the first seventy-two hours, it seemed the mullahs and their allies in the Revolutionary Guards had chosen silence. It cracked, however, when rumors of the mysterious explosions reached the ears of a certain
Washington Post
reporter known for the infallibility of his sources inside the White House. He confirmed the reports with a few well-placed phone calls and published his findings the next morning in a front-page exclusive. The story ignited a firestorm, which is precisely what the men behind it had in mind.

Now under international pressure to explain the events, the Iranians shifted from silence to deception. Yes, they said, there had indeed been a string of unfortunate accidents at a number of civilian and military installations. Precisely how many facilities had been damaged the regime refused to say, only that all were nonnuclear in nature. "But this should come as a surprise to no one," the Iranian president said in an interview with a friendly journalist from China. "The Islamic Republic has no desire to produce nuclear weapons. Our program is entirely peaceful."

But still the leaks kept coming. And still the questions continued to be asked. If the four facilities involved were truly nonnuclear, why were they concealed in tunnels? And if they were for entirely peaceful purposes, why did the regime attempt to keep the explosions a secret? Since the mullahs refused to answer, the International Atomic Energy Agency did so for them. In a dramatic special report, the IAEA stated conclusively that each of the four facilities housed a cascade of centrifuges. There was only one possible conclusion to be drawn from the evidence. The Iranians were enriching uranium in secret. And they were planning to go for nuclear breakout.

The report was an earthquake. Within hours there were calls at the United Nations for crippling sanctions while the president of France suggested it might be time for allied military action--with the Americans taking the lead, of course. Painted into a rhetorical corner by years of deception, the Iranian regime had no option but to lash out, claiming it had been forced into a program of widespread concealment by constant Western threats. Furthermore, said the regime, its own investigation of the explosions had revealed they were caused by sabotage. High on the list of suspects were the Great Satan and its Zionist ally. "Tampering with our plants was an act of war," said the Iranian president. "And the Islamic Republic will respond in the very near future in a manner of our choosing."

The level of bombast rose quickly, as did the specificity of Iranian accusations of American and Israeli involvement. Sensing an opportunity to strengthen its position internally, the regime called on the Iranian people to protest this wanton violation of sovereignty. What they got instead was the largest rally in the history of the Iranian opposition movement. The mullahs responded by unleashing the dreaded Basij paramilitary forces. By the end of the day, more than a hundred protesters were dead and thousands more were in custody.

If the mullahs thought a display of naked brutality would end the protests, they were mistaken, for in the days to come, the streets of Tehran would become a virtual war zone of Green Movement rage and dissent. In the West, commentators speculated that the days of the regime might be numbered while security experts predicted a coming wave of Iranian-backed terrorism. Two questions, however, remained unanswered. Who had actually carried off the act of sabotage? And how had they managed to do it?

There were many theories, all wildly inaccurate. Not one referred to a long-lost Rembrandt now hanging in the National Gallery in Washington, or a former British newspaper reporter who was now a star on American cable news, or a Swiss financier known to all the world as Saint Martin who was anything but. Nor did they mention a man of medium build with gray temples who was often seen hiking alone along the sea cliffs of Cornwall--sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by a broad-shouldered youth with matinee-idol good looks.

On a warmish afternoon in early June, while nearing the southern end of Kynance Cove, he spotted an elderly, bespectacled figure standing on the terrace of the Polpeor Cafe at Lizard Point. For an instant, he considered turning in the opposite direction. Instead, he lowered his head and kept walking. The old man had traveled a long way to see him. The least he could do was say a proper good-bye.