House of Spies (Gabriel Allon #17)(33)
Pain disturbed his sleep, as did nightmares of tumbling downward through a maelstrom of masonry and glass and blood. Nevertheless, he woke early on the fourth morning to find his headache gone and his thoughts clear. Rising before Chiara and the children, he went into the kitchen and made coffee, which he drank while watching the news on television. Afterward, he crept into the bathroom and confronted his reflection in the mirror. The image in the glass was by any objective measure disturbing. The left side of the face was reasonably intact, but the right—the side that had been turned toward the full force of the blast—was another story entirely. The eye was blackened and swollen, and there were numerous small cuts and abrasions left by flying glass and debris. It was not the face of a chief, he thought; it was the face of an avenger. He filled the basin with scalding water and slowly, painfully, scraped a week’s growth from his chin and cheeks. Each stroke of the razor sent a charge of pain into the base of his spine, and a sneeze, wholly unexpected, left him doubled over for several seconds in agony.
Showered, he returned to the bedroom to find that Chiara had risen. He pulled on a pair of gabardine trousers and a dress shirt with only minimal pain, but the effort of tying his Oxford shoes nearly drove him to the sanctuary of his bed. Smiling tightly to conceal his discomfort, he went into the kitchen where Chiara was preparing a fresh pot of coffee.
“All better?” She handed him a cup of coffee and looked him up and down. “Please tell me you’re not thinking about going to King Saul Boulevard.”
In truth, he was. But the tone of Chiara’s voice led him to reconsider. “Actually,” he said, “I was hoping to spend some time with the children, and I wanted to look like a person again rather than a patient.”
“Good recovery,” said Chiara skeptically. Just then, there came a chirp of laughter from the nursery. She smiled and whispered, “And so it begins.”
He made a brave show of it. He helped Chiara dress the children, an activity that inflicted on him no small amount of pain, and supervised the chaotic food fight otherwise known as breakfast. He spent the remainder of the morning playing games, reading stories, watching developmental videos, and changing an endless parade of soiled diapers. Mainly, he wondered how Chiara managed to care for the children alone, day after day, without collapsing with exhaustion or losing her mind. Running one of the world’s most formidable intelligence services suddenly seemed a rather trivial pursuit by comparison.
Nap time was an oasis. Gabriel slept, too, and when he woke he went onto the terrace to warm his weary body in the Jerusalem sun. This time, however, he brought a stack of reading material—the five hundred pages of Jean-Luc Martel’s file, a copy of which he had carried out of France. Martel had been the target of on-and-off French interest for more than a decade. And yet, with the exception of two minor scrapes having to do with unpaid taxes, both of which were settled far from public view, his reputation remained beyond reproach. The most recent probe of his business empire had taken place two years earlier. It had been launched after a midlevel drug dealer offered to testify against Martel in exchange for a reduced prison sentence. In the end the case was closed for lack of evidence, though the chief investigating officer, a man with an unassailable character, retired early in protest. Perhaps not coincidentally, the drug dealer whose accusation started the probe was later found dead in his prison cell, his throat slashed.
The investigation produced reams of communications intercepts—some salacious, many prosaic, all insignificant—and several hundred surveillance photos. Rousseau sent along a sampling of the best. There was Jean-Luc Martel at the Cannes Film Festival, Jean-Luc Martel at the Biennale in Venice, Jean-Luc Martel in the front row at Fashion Week in New York, Jean-Luc Martel on his 142-foot motor yacht in the Mediterranean, Jean-Luc Martel on the rue de Rh?ne in Geneva, and Jean-Luc Martel at the gala grand opening of his new restaurant in Paris, which was a smash because, according to one estimate, he dropped a cool five million euros to make certain every French celebrity of note was in attendance, along with an American reality television star who was famous for being famous, and a pair of American hip-hop artists who had unkind things to say about France’s treatment of racial minorities.
In none of the photos was Martel alone; the woman was always with him. The unusually tall and long-limbed woman, with wide blue eyes and Nordic-blond hair that fell straight about her square shoulders. She was not French, but English—curious, for Martel was a public champion of all things Gallic. Her name meant nothing to Gabriel, but her flawless face was vaguely familiar. An ordinary Internet search produced more than four thousand highly professional images. Advertisements for clothing. For jewelry. For an exclusive line of wristwatches. For fragrance. For swimwear. For an Italian sports car of dubious reliability. But all that was in her past. She was now the nominal owner of a well-regarded art gallery in the Place de l’Ormeau in Saint-Tropez, against which the French authorities had found no fault. A further search of publicly available documents and news items revealed that she was an atrocious driver, had been arrested twice on minor drug charges, and had been involved in a string of questionable romantic entanglements—footballers, actors, a member of Parliament, an aging glam-rock star who had bedded every other fashion model in Britain. She had never been married, and had no children, parents, or siblings. She was, thought Gabriel, alone in the world.
In most of the French surveillance photographs, her gaze was averted, her face downcast. But in one, taken on the ?le Saint-Louis in Paris, she was caught staring directly into the lens of the camera. It was this photograph that Gabriel showed to Uzi Navot late that evening, at the small table in Gabriel’s kitchen. It was approaching midnight; Navot, who had spent the better part of the last decade on one fad diet or another, was slowly devouring the remnants of Chiara’s dinner. He studied the photo carefully between bites. A former recruiter and runner of agents, he had a keen eye for talent.