The Rembrandt Affair

and pockmarks on his face.
    Not by coincidence, that same man was seated next to Zoe on the train. His forged New Zealand passport identified him as Leighton Smith, though his real name was Yaakov Rossman, one of four members of Gabriel’s team who accompanied Zoe on her return to London. She passed most of the train ride reading the morning papers, and upon her arrival at St. Pancras was covertly returned to the custody of MI5. They drove her to work in an ersatz taxi and snapped several pictures as she disappeared through the entrance. As promised, Gabriel ordered the digital tap on Zoe’s phone disconnected, and within minutes she vanished from the Office’s global surveillance grid. Few members of the Masterpiece team seemed to notice. Because by then they were all listening to the voice of Martin Landesmann.

53
    HIGHGATE, LONDON
    T o some extent, computer networks and communications devices can be shielded from outside penetration. But if the attack occurs from the inside—or by gaining access to the devices themselves—there is little the target can do to defend himself. With but a few lines of well-crafted code, a mobile phone or laptop computer can be convinced to betray its owner’s most closely guarded secrets—and continue betraying them for months or even years. The machines are perfect spies. They do not require money or validation or love. Their motives are beyond question, for they have none of their own. They are reliable, dependable, and willing to work extraordinarily long hours. They do not become depressed or drink too much. They do not have spouses who berate them or children who disappoint them. They do not become lonely or frightened. They do not burn out. Obsolescence is their only weakness. More often than not, they are discarded merely because something better comes along.
    The nature of the intelligence assault on Martin Landesmann, while breathtaking in scale, was routine in the world of twenty-first-century espionage. Gone were the days when the only option for eavesdropping on a target involved planting a battery-powered radio transmitter in his home or office. Now the targets willingly carried transmitters with them in the form of their own cellular phones and other mobile devices. Intelligence operatives didn’t have to recharge weakening batteries because the targets did that themselves. Nor was it necessary for operatives to spend endless hours sitting in dreary listening posts since material acquired from a wi-fi device could be fed via the Internet to computers anywhere in the world.
    In the case of Operation Masterpiece, those computers were tucked away in a redbrick Victorian house located at the end of a hushed cul-de-sac in the Highgate section of London. After working around the clock preparing for the operation in Paris, Gabriel and his team now worked around the clock sorting and analyzing the immense haul. In the blink of an eye, the life of one of the world’s most reclusive businessmen was now an open book. Indeed, as Uzi Navot would describe it to the prime minister during their weekly breakfast meeting, “Anywhere Martin goes, we go with him.”
    They listened to his phone calls, they read his e-mail, they peered quietly over his shoulder while he surfed the Web. They negotiated deals with him, ate lunch with him, and went to cocktail receptions tucked in his breast pocket. They slept with him, bathed with him, exercised with him, and overheard a quarrel with Monique over his frequent trips to Paris. They accompanied him on a flying visit to Stockholm and were forced to endure an excruciating evening of Wagner with him. They knew his exact position on the planet at all times, and if he happened to be in motion, they knew the speed he was traveling. They also discovered that Saint Martin liked to spend a great deal of time alone sequestered in his office at Villa Elma, an expansive room located on the southeast corner of the mansion overlooking Lake Geneva, at precisely 1,238 feet above sea level.
    There can be an obvious drawback to receiving such a vast amount of intelligence—the possibility that a vital piece of the puzzle might be swamped by a tsunami of useless information. Gabriel sought to avoid this pitfall by making certain that at least half the team remained focused on the true prize of the Paris operation, Martin’s laptop. The haul was not limited to the material contained on the computer the night of the operation in Paris. Indeed, through a