The Rembrandt Affair

Rafael Bloch.
    For his classroom, Gabriel chose the familiar surroundings of the Highgate safe house, though by the time Zoe arrived for her first session it no longer bore any resemblance to a private London club. Its walls were covered with maps, photographs, and diagrams, and its rooms were occupied by a large group of Israelis who seemed more like harried graduate students than accomplished intelligence operatives. They greeted the new arrival as though they had been expecting her for a long time, then crowded around the dining-room table for a quick takeaway curry. The warmth displayed by Gabriel’s team was genuine, even if the names they hid behind were not. Zoe gravitated naturally toward the tweedy, Oxbridge-educated Yossi, though she was clearly intrigued by an attractive woman with long dark hair who referred to herself as Rachel.
    The enormous operational constraints forced Gabriel to dispense with normal methods of training and design a true crash course in the basics of espionage. It began immediately after dinner when Zoe was placed on a conveyor belt of sorts that whisked her from room to room, briefing to briefing. They trained her in the basics of countersurveillance and impersonal communication. They taught her how to move in public and how to conceal emotion and fear. And they even gave her a few lessons in self-defense. “She’s naturally aggressive,” Rimona told Gabriel, a bag of frozen peas pressed to her swollen eye. “And she has a wicked left elbow.”
    She was a gifted pupil, but then they had expected nothing less. By the end of the first night, the team unanimously declared her an amazingly quick study—high praise, given the quality of past recruits. Blessed with the skills of an elite reporter, she was able to store, sort, and retrieve vast amounts of information with remarkable speed. Even Dina, who carried a database of terrorism in her brain, was impressed by Zoe’s power of recall. “She’s used to working under a deadline,” Dina said. “The harder we push, the better she reacts.”
    Her final stop each night was the small upstairs study. There, alone with Gabriel, she would repeatedly rehearse the procedures that were the central purpose for her recruitment. If successful, Gabriel promised, Martin’s world would be an open book. One mistake, he cautioned, and she would sink the entire operation and place herself in grave danger. She was to assume that the wolf was just outside the door waiting to catch her in the ultimate act of betrayal. To defeat him would require speed and near silence. Speed came easily; silence proved far more elusive. It was finally achieved late on the second night, when a recording of the session revealed nothing audible to the human ear.
    Zoe’s rapid training, however, was only one of Gabriel’s concerns. There were vehicles to rent, additional personnel to move into place, and a safe flat to acquire on the Right Bank of the river Seine, not far from the Hôtel de Ville. And given the high-profile involvement of the British, there were many high-profile meetings to attend. The Iran team from MI6 found its way to the planning table, as did representatives of the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence. Indeed, each time Gabriel entered Thames House, the crowd seemed larger. There were obvious risks to working in such close proximity to sister intelligence services—namely, that those same services were taking careful note of every operational tendency they were able to observe. Gabriel’s exposure was increased by the fact that he was living and working inside an MI5 safe house. Though Graham Seymour denied he was listening in on the preparations, Gabriel was confident that every word uttered by his team was being recorded and analyzed by MI5. But such was the price to be paid for British cooperation against Martin Landesmann. And for Zoe.
    Gabriel remained faithful to the original operational accord and grudgingly allowed Graham Seymour to handle Zoe’s surveillance. Over the objections of the lawyers, Seymour extended the zone of coverage to include Zoe’s telephone and computer inside the offices of the Financial Journal. The intercepts of her calls and electronic correspondence exposed no indiscretion or second thoughts of any kind. Nor did they reveal any undisclosed contact from one Martin Landesmann, chairman of Global Vision Investments of Geneva.
    On Zoe’s final night at the Highgate safe house, she seemed more focused