House of Spies (Gabriel Allon #17)(34)
“She’s trouble,” he said. “Avoid.”
“Think she knows where her famous boyfriend really gets his money?”
“A girl like that . . .” Navot shrugged his heavy shoulders. “She knows. They always know.”
“The gallery is in her name.”
“You’re thinking about getting rough with her?”
“It’s not my first choice, but one should never limit one’s options.”
“How do you intend to play it?”
Gabriel explained while Navot finished the last of the food.
“You’ll need a Russian arms dealer,” Navot said.
“I have one.”
“Is he married, or does he play the field?”
“Married,” said Gabriel. “Very married.”
“Which flavor?”
“A nice French girl.”
“Anyone I know?”
Gabriel gave no answer. Navot stared at the photograph of the beautiful, long-limbed woman. “A girl like that won’t come cheap,” he said. “You’re going to need money.”
“I know where we can get money, Uzi.” Gabriel smiled. “Lots of money.”
19
King Saul Boulevard, Tel Aviv
It would be another seventy-two hours before Jean-Luc Martel, hotelier, restaurateur, clothier, jeweler, and international dealer of illicit narcotics, became the target of full-time Office surveillance, along with Olivia Watson, his not-quite wife. The delay had to do with their location, and the season of the year. Their location was the enchanted West Indian island of Saint Barthélemy, and the season was late winter, which meant there was not a rental villa or hotel room to be had in the entire resort. Under Gabriel’s unrelenting pressure, Travel finally managed to lay its hands on a mosquito-infested hut overlooking the salt marshes of Saline. Mordecai and Oded, a pair of all-purpose Office field hands, settled there soon after, accompanied by two female escort officers, both of whom spoke American English. The French contributed no personnel, despite the fact that, technically speaking, it was their soil. Paul Rousseau’s Alpha Group was in no condition to operate against anyone; it was still mourning its dead and searching for a new clandestine headquarters in Paris. And as far as the rest of official France was concerned—the various ministers, the heads of the intelligence and security services, the police and prosecutors—there was no operation.
The target of this nonexistent operation, however, had no difficulty in finding accommodation in Saint Barthélemy. He owned a large villa in the hills above the village of Saint-Jean, from which he could behold his luxury hotel, his boutique specializing in beachwear for women, and his restaurant, which he called Chez Olivia. The first batch of surveillance photos showed her stretched nude beside the pool at Martel’s villa. The next depicted her in various stages of undress. Gabriel advised the team to devote its energies to more than photography. He already knew how Olivia Watson looked; what he wanted was hard intelligence. He was rewarded with another photo, this one showing Martel in flagrante delicto with one of the salesgirls from his boutique. Gabriel tucked the picture away for safekeeping, though he was dubious of its potential impact. When a woman entered into a relationship with a Frenchman, especially one as good-looking as Jean-Luc Martel, infidelity was part of the bargain. He only wondered whether Olivia Watson played by the same set of rules.
They would remain on Saint Barthélemy for the next ten days, unaware of the fact that several thousand miles away, in an anonymous office block in Tel Aviv, their lives were under a sustained if quiet assault. Eli Lavon, a skilled financial investigator, burrowed into JLM Enterprises, which, for all its Frenchness, was headquartered just across the border in secretive Geneva. With the help of Unit 8200, Israel’s ultra-secret signals intelligence service, Lavon pondered JLM’s balance sheets and tax records at his leisure. They revealed that the company was highly profitable indeed. Abnormally so, in the opinion of Lavon, who had a well-trained eye for dirty money. He then analyzed the company unit by unit. The restaurants, the hotels, the nightclubs, the boutiques and jewelry shops. All were in the black, a rather remarkable run of good fortune during a period of sluggish overall economic growth. The same could be said for Galerie Olivia Watson in Saint-Tropez. Indeed, while the rest of the art world was struggling in the post–Great Recession market, Galerie Olivia Watson had sold more than two hundred million dollars’ worth of art during the past eighteen months alone.
“Calder, Pollock, Rothko, Basquiat, three works by Roy Lichtenstein, three more by de Kooning, a couple of Rauschenbergs, and more Warhols than I could count.”
“Very impressive,” said Gabriel.
“Especially when you consider the prices she’s getting. I compared them to sales at auction houses in New York and London.”
“And?”
“Not even close.”
“Maybe she’s a good negotiator,” said Gabriel.
“I can tell you one thing. She’s discreet. Nearly all the sales are totally private.”
“Were you able to find any shipping waybills?”
“As a matter of fact, I was.”
“And?”
“During the past six months, she’s shipped four paintings to the same address in the Geneva Freeport.”