The Rembrandt Affair

"Would you like to come and personally supervise?"

"As you well know, Gabriel, I'm forbidden by law from operating on foreign soil."

"How do you manage to gather any intelligence with all these rules?"

"We're not like you, Gabriel. We're British. Rules make us happy."

50

MAYFAIR, LONDON

As with nearly every other aspect of Masterpiece, choosing the location of an operational command post was the source of tense negotiation. For reasons of both design and statute, the ops center at MI5 was deemed unsuitable for a foreign venture, even one as close as Paris. MI6 made a predictable play to stage the event at Vauxhall Cross—an offer summarily rejected by Graham Seymour, who was already fighting a losing battle to keep his glamorous rival out of what he regarded as his operation. Since the Israelis had no London operations center—at least not a declared one—that left only the Americans. Ru

Having settled on the venue, there was the small matter of the invitees. As Seymour feared, the list of those wishing to attend quickly grew atrociously long—so long, in fact, he felt compelled to remind his brethren it was an intelligence operation they were staging, not a West End premiere. Moreover, since the operation was likely to produce material inappropriate for broad dissemination, it had to be conducted with more than the usual sensitivity. Other agencies would eventually be briefed on the haul, Seymour declared, but under no circumstances could they be present when it was obtained. The guest list would be limited to the three principals—the three members of a secret brotherhood who did the unpleasant chores no one else was willing to do and worried about the consequences later.

Though the precise location of the CIA's London ops center was a carefully guarded secret, Graham Seymour knew with considerable certainty that it was located some forty feet beneath the southwest corner of Grosvenor Square. He had always been somewhat amused by this, since on any given day several hundred anxious visa applicants were queued overhead, including the occasional jihadi bent on attacking the American homeland. Because the facility did not officially exist, it had no official name. Those in the know, however, referred to it as the a

It was a few minutes after six p.m. by the time Seymour finally gained admittance to the a

Unlike her colleagues at the Journal, Zoe's day had been the subject of close scrutiny by the intelligence services of three nations. They knew that it had begun badly with a twenty-minute delay on the dreaded Northern Line tube. They knew she arrived for work at 9:45 looking deeply a

Zoe finally emerged from Journal headquarters at 6:15, a few minutes later than Gabriel had hoped, and hailed a taxi. By no accident, one pulled to the curb immediately and ferried her at inordinate speed to St. Pancras. She navigated passport control in record time and headed to the boarding platform, where she was recognized by a lecherous City banker who proclaimed himself her biggest fan.

Zoe feared the man would be seated near her on the train but was relieved when her traveling companion turned out to be the quiet, dark-haired girl from Highgate who called herself Sally. Four other members of the team were also aboard Zoe's carriage, including an elfin figure with wispy hair she knew as Max and the tweedy Englishman who called himself David. Neither bothered to inform the ops center at Grosvenor Square that Zoe had made her train. CCTV did it for them.

"So far, so good," said Shamron, his gaze fastened on the video screens. "All we need now is our leading man."

BUT EVEN as Shamron uttered those words, the three spymasters already knew that Martin Landesma

For the next two hours, Saint Martin sat with monastic serenity in the VIP lounge of Vie

For Gabriel Allon, standing in the window of the safe flat directly across the river Seine, the arrival of Martin Landesma

Gabriel raised his night-vision binoculars to his eyes and surveyed the battlefield. Yaakov was in a Peugeot sedan parked along the river, Oded was in a Renault hatchback wedged into the narrow street at the side of Martin's building, and Mordecai was in a Ford van parked near the foot of the Pont Marie. All three would maintain a sleepless vigil for the duration of the evening, as would the three men in the black S-Class Mercedes parked outside 21 Quai de Bourbon. One was Henri Cassin, Martin's usual driver in Paris. The other two were officially licensed bodyguards employed by Zentrum Security. Just then, Gabriel heard a sharp crackle of static. Lowering his binoculars, he turned to Chiara, who was hunched over a laptop computer monitoring the live audio stream from Zoe's mobile phone.