Daniel Silva - The Rembrandt Affair

"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...

As 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.

BUT 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."