Daniel Silva - The New Girl

“He wished to remain anonymous so as not to overshadow his subject.”

“He’s famous?”

“In certain circles.”

“You know him?”

“Yes, of course.”

Khalid’s eyes moved back to the painting. “Did she sit for him?”

“Actually, he painted her entirely from memory.”

“Not even a photograph?”

Sarah shook her head.

“Remarkable. He must have admired her to paint something so beautiful. Unfortunately, I never had the pleasure of meeting her. She had quite a reputation when she was young.”

“She changed a great deal after her father’s death.”

“Zizi al-Bakari didn’t die . He was murdered in cold blood in the Old Port of Cannes by an Israeli assassin named Gabriel Allon.” Khalid held Sarah’s gaze for a moment before entering the wing’s first room, one of four dedicated to Impressionism. He approached a Renoir and eyed it enviously. “These paintings belong in Riyadh.”

“Nadia entrusted them permanently to MoMA and named me as the caretaker. They’re staying exactly where they are.”

“Perhaps you’ll let me buy them.”

“They’re not for sale.”

“Everything is for sale, Sarah.” He smiled briefly. It was an effort, she could see that. He paused before the next painting, a landscape by Monet, and then surveyed the room. “Nothing by Van Gogh?”

“No.”

“Rather odd, don’t you think?”

“What’s that?”

“For a collection like this to have so glaring a hole.”

“A quality Van Gogh is hard to come by.”

“That’s not what my sources tell me. In fact, I have it on the highest authority that Zizi briefly owned a little-known Van Gogh called Marguerite Gachet at Her Dressing Table . He purchased it from a gallery in London.” Khalid studied Sarah carefully. “Shall I go on?”

Sarah said nothing.

“The gallery is owned by a man named Julian Isherwood. At the time of the sale, an American woman was working there. Apparently, Zizi was quite smitten with her. He invited her to join him on his annual winter cruise in the Caribbean. His yacht was much smaller than mine. It was called—”

“ Alexandra ,” said Sarah, cutting him off. Then she asked, “How long have you known?”

“That my art adviser is a CIA officer?”

“ Was . I no longer work for the Agency. And I no longer work for you.”

“What about the Israelis?” He smiled. “Do you really think I would have allowed you to come anywhere near me without first having a look into your background?”

“And yet you pursued me.”

“I did indeed.”

“Why?”

“Because I knew that one day you might be able to help me with more than my art collection.” Khalid walked past Sarah without another word and stood before Nadia’s portrait. “Do you know how to reach him?”

“Who?”

“The man who produced this painting without so much as a photograph to guide his hand.” Khalid pointed toward the bottom right corner of the canvas. “The man whose name should be right there.”

“You’re the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. Why do you need me to contact the chief of Israeli intelligence?”

“My daughter,” he answered. “Someone has taken my daughter.”

SARAH BANCROFT’S CALL TO GABRIEL ALLON went unanswered that evening, for as was often the case he was in the field. Due to the sensitive nature of his mission, only the prime minister and a handful of his most trusted senior officers knew his whereabouts—a moderate-size villa with ocher-colored walls, hard along the shore of the Caspian Sea. Behind the villa, rectangular plots of farmland stretched toward the foothills of the eastern Caucasus Mountains. Atop one of the hills stood a small mosque. Five times each day the crackling loudspeaker in the minaret summoned the faithful to prayer. His long quarrel with the forces of radical Islam notwithstanding, Gabriel found the sound of the muezzin’s voice comforting. At that moment in time, he had no better friend in the world than the Muslim citizens of Azerbaijan.

The nominal owner of the villa was a Baku-based real estate holding company. Its true owner, however, was Housekeeping, the division of the Israeli intelligence service that procured and managed safe properties. The arrangement had been covertly blessed by the chief of the Azerbaijani security service, with whom Gabriel had cultivated an unusually close relationship. Azerbaijan’s neighbor to the south was the Islamic Republic of Iran. Indeed, the Iranian border was only five kilometers from the villa, which explained why Gabriel had not set foot beyond its walls since his arrival. Had the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps known of his presence, it would have doubtless mounted an attempt to assassinate or abduct him. Gabriel did not begrudge their loathing of him. Such were the rules of the game in a rough neighborhood. Besides, if presented with the chance to kill the head of the Revolutionary Guard, he would have gladly pulled the trigger himself.

The villa by the sea was not the only logistical asset Gabriel had at his disposal in Azerbaijan. His service—those who worked there referred to it as “the Office” and nothing else—also maintained a small fleet of fishing boats, cargo ships, and fast motor launches, all with proper Azerbaijani registry. The vessels shuttled regularly between Azerbaijani harbors and the Iranian coastline, where they inserted Office agents and operational teams and collected valuable Iranian assets willing to do Israel’s bidding.

A year earlier, one of those assets, a man who worked deep inside Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program, had been brought by boat to the Office’s villa in Ashtara. There he had told Gabriel about a warehouse in a drab commercial district of Tehran. The warehouse contained thirty-two safes of Iranian manufacture. Inside were hundreds of computer disks and millions of pages of documents. The source claimed the material proved conclusively what Iran had long denied, that it had worked methodically and tirelessly to construct an implosion nuclear device and attach it to a delivery system capable of reaching Israel and beyond.

For the better part of the last year, the Office had been watching the warehouse with human surveillance artists and miniature cameras. They had learned that the first shift of security guards arrived each morning at seven. They had also learned that for several hours each night, beginning around ten o’clock, the warehouse was protected only by the locks on its doors and the surrounding fence. Gabriel and Yaakov Rossman, the chief of special operations, had agreed that the team would remain inside no later than five a.m. The source had told them which safes to open and which to ignore. Owing to the method of entry—torches that burned at 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit—there was no way to conceal the operation. Therefore, Gabriel had ordered the team not to copy the relevant material but to steal it outright. Copies were easily denied. Originals were harder to explain. Furthermore, the brazenness of seizing Iran’s nuclear archives and smuggling them out of the country would humiliate the regime in front of its restive populace. Gabriel loved nothing more than embarrassing the Iranians.

But stealing the original documents increased the risk of the operation exponentially. Encrypted copies could be carried out of the country on a couple of high-capacity flash drives. The originals would be much harder to move and conceal. An Iranian asset of the Office had purchased a Volvo cargo truck. If the security guards at the warehouse kept to their normal schedule, the team would have a two-hour head start. Their route would take them from the fringes of Tehran, over the Alborz Mountains, and down to the shore of the Caspian. The exfiltration point was a beach near the town of Babolsar. The backup was a few miles to the east at Khazar Abad. All sixteen members of the team planned to leave together. Most were Farsi-speaking Iranian Jews who could easily pass as native Persians. The team leader, however, was Mikhail Abramov, a Moscow-born officer who had carried out numerous dangerous assignments for the Office, including the assassination of a top Iranian nuclear scientist in the center of Tehran. Mikhail was the operation’s sore thumb. In Gabriel’s experience, every operation needed at least one.