Portrait of an Unknown Woman (Gabriel Allon #22) (102)

Gabriel quickly disconnected his computer from the hotel’s Wi-Fi network and instructed Evelyn to do the same. “How long will it take you to retype the piece?”

“It’s not a matter of simply retyping it. I have to rewrite it from beginning to end. Five thousand words. Entirely from memory.”

“Then I suggest you get started.” Gabriel snatched up his phone and looked at Sarah. “Double-lock the door, and don’t open it for anyone but me.”

He went into the corridor without another word and headed for the elevators. An empty carriage appeared at once. He rode it down to the lobby and left the hotel via the Fifth Avenue entrance.

Outside, the sun had dropped below the trees of Central Park, but the twilight was abundant. Gabriel turned to the left and then made another left onto East Sixtieth Street. As he passed the entrance of the fabled Metropolitan Club, the private playground of New York’s financial elite, he spotted two men sitting in a parked Suburban. Both were wearing earpieces. The one behind the wheel noticed Gabriel first. He said something to his partner, who turned his head to have a look at the legend as well.

The legend rounded the corner onto Madison Avenue and walked to East Sixty-First Street. The second team was parked directly opposite the Pierre’s delivery entrance. They were three in number—the third member being the hacker who had penetrated the Pierre’s Wi-Fi network and sucked the documents off Evelyn’s laptop.

Gabriel was tempted to ask the hacker to return the purloined material. Instead, he crossed Fifth Avenue and entered Central Park. There he sat down on a bench and waited for his phone to ring, wondering, not for the first time, how his life had come to this.



Though Gabriel did not know it, Magdalena was at that moment pondering the same question. She was seated not on a park bench but in the back of a luxury SUV, next to a man who a few minutes earlier had threatened to kill her if she did not agree to flee the country with the financier whose art-based hedge fund she had exposed as a fraud. She had been given no information regarding their destination, though her lack of a passport suggested that their journey would be unconventional. It would begin, apparently, with a helicopter flight, as they were parked beneath the FDR Drive, near the pale-gray, boxlike terminal of the East Thirty-Fourth Street Heliport.

Magdalena glanced at her wristwatch, the Cartier tank that Clarissa the personal shopper had chosen for her at Bergdorf Goodman that frigid December afternoon in 2008. What a waste, she thought suddenly, these costly trinkets. Art was all that mattered—art and books and music. And family, of course. It had been a mistake to involve her father in Phillip’s fraud. Still, she was confident he would not be prosecuted. Art criminals never received the punishment they deserved. It was one of the reasons there was so much art crime.

A second SUV drew up beside them, and Tyler Briggs emerged from the passenger seat. Evidently, Magdalena would have a chaperone on the first leg of her journey into exile, lest she misbehave on board the aircraft and endanger the crew. She was considering one final act of insurrection before leaving Manhattan, a parting gesture to avenge her split and swollen lip.

Her seatmate was looking down at his phone. “Your ride is about to land,” he informed her.

“Where am I going?”

“East Hampton.”

“In time for dinner, I hope.”

“It’s only the first stop.”

“And then?”

“Somewhere you’ll be able to use that Spanish of yours.”

“How’s yours?”

“Fluent, actually.”

“In that case, you won’t have any trouble understanding what I’m about to tell you.”

Calmly, she recited the crudest, vilest Spanish insult she could bring herself to repeat. The gray man in the gray suit only smiled. “Phillip always said you have quite a mouth on you.”

This time it was Magdalena who lashed out without warning. Her blow opened a small cut in the corner of his eye. He wiped away the blood with a linen pocket square.

“Get on the helicopter, Ms. Navarro. Otherwise, there’s a shallow grave in your future.”

“Yours, too, I imagine.”

Tyler Briggs opened Magdalena’s door and escorted her to the waiting Sikorsky. Five minutes later they were headed across the East River. Before them stretched the working-class neighborhoods of Queens and the suburbs of Nassau and Suffolk counties. That slender riotous island, thought Magdalena.

She checked her Cartier. It was 7:50 p.m. At least she thought it was. The damn watch kept lousy time.





68

Pierre Hotel




Ray Bennett, the Pierre Hotel’s head of security, was roughly the same size as Capitano Luca Rossetti. Well over six feet tall, at least 225 pounds. Most of that weight remained in reasonably good shape for a man of his age, which was mid-fifties. His hair was metallic gray and well groomed, his face was wide and square. It was a face, thought Gabriel, that had been made to take a punch. He asked its owner whether it would be possible for them to have a word in private. Ray Bennett said he preferred to speak in the lobby.

“That would be a mistake on your part, Mr. Bennett.”

“And why is that, sir?”

“Because your colleagues will hear what I have to say to you.”

Bennett contemplated Gabriel with a pair of all-seeing cop’s eyes. “What’s this about?”