The following morning, Graham Seymour called from Thames House to say that Ivan Kharkov’s plane-a Boeing Business Jet, tail number N7287IK-had just filed a flight plan and was due to arrive at Stansted Airport north of London at 4:30 P.M. After hanging up the phone, Gabriel applied the final touches of paint to his ersatz version of Two Children on a Beach by Mary Cassatt. Three hours later, he removed the canvas from its stretcher and carried it downstairs to the kitchen, where he placed it in a 350-degree oven. Sarah found him there twenty minutes later, leaning nonchalantly against the counter, coffee mug in hand.
“What’s that smell?”
Gabriel glanced down at the oven. Sarah peered through the window, then looked up in alarm.
“Why are you baking the Cassatt?”
Just then the kitchen timer chimed softly. Gabriel removed the canvas from the oven and allowed it to cool slightly, then laid it faceup on the table. With Sarah watching, he took hold of the canvas at the top and bottom and pulled it firmly over the edge of the table, downward toward the floor. Then he gave the painting a quarter turn and dragged it hard against the edge of the table a second time. He examined the surface for a moment, then, satisfied, held it up for Sarah to see. Earlier that morning, the paint had been smooth and pristine. Now the combination of heat and pressure had left the surface covered by a fine webbing of fissures and cracks.
“Amazing,” she whispered.
“It’s not amazing,” he said. “It’s craquelure.”
Whistling tunelessly to himself, he carried the canvas upstairs to his studio, placed it back on the original stretcher, and covered the painting with a thin coat of yellow-tinted varnish. When the varnish had dried, he summoned Sarah and John Boothby to the studio and asked them to choose which canvas was the original, and which was the forgery. After several minutes of careful comparison and consultation, both agreed that the painting on the right was the original, and the one on the left was the forgery.
“You’re absolutely sure?” Gabriel asked.
After another round of consultation, two heads nodded in unison. Gabriel removed the painting on the right from its easel and mounted it in the new frame that had just arrived from Arnold Wiggins amp; Sons. Sarah and John Boothby, humiliated over being duped, carried the forgery up to the main house and hung it in the nursery. Gabriel climbed into the back of an MI5 car and, with Nigel Whitcombe at his side, headed back to London. The operation was in Alistair Leach’s hands now. But, then, it always had been.
33 THAMES HOUSE, LONDON
Gabriel knew that discretion came naturally to those who work the highlands of the art trade, but even Gabriel was surprised by the extent to which Alistair Leach had remained faithful to his vow of silence. Indeed, after more than a week of relentless digging and observation MI5 had found no trace of evidence to suggest he had broken discipline in any way-nothing in his phone calls, nothing in his e-mail or faxes, and nothing in his personal contacts. He had even allowed things to cool with Rosemary Gibbons, his lady friend from Sotheby’s. Whitcombe, who had been appointed Leach’s guardian and confessor, explained why during a final preoperational dinner. “It’s not that Alistair’s no longer fond of her,” he said. “He’s chivalrous, our Alistair. He knows we’re watching him and he’s trying to protect her. It’s quite possible he’s the last decent man left in the whole of London -present company excluded, of course.” Gabriel gave Whitcombe a check for one hundred thousand pounds and a brief script. “Tell him not to blow his lines, Nigel. Tell him expectations couldn’t be higher.”
Leach’s star turn was to occur during a matinee performance but was no less significant because of it. For this phase of the operation, Graham Seymour insisted on using Thames House as a command post, and Gabriel, having no other choice, reluctantly agreed. The ops room was a hushed chamber of blinking monitors and twinkling lights, staffed by earnest-looking young men and women whose faces reflected the rainbow racial quilt of modern Britain. Gabriel wore a guest pass that read BLACKBURN: USA. It fooled no one.
At 2:17 P.M., he was informed by Graham Seymour that the stage was now set and the performance ready to commence. Gabriel made one final check of the video monitors and, with several MI5 officers watching expectantly, nodded his head. Seymour leaned forward into a microphone and ordered the curtain to be raised.
He was conservatively dressed and possessed a churchman’s forgiving smile. His card identified him as Jonathan Owens, associate editor of something called the Cambridge Online Journal of Contemporary Art. He claimed to have an appointment. Try as she might, the receptionist in the lobby of Christie’s could find no record of it in her logbook.
“Would it be too much trouble to actually ring him?” the handsome young man asked through a benedictory smile. “I’m sure he’s just forgotten to notify you.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” said the receptionist. “Give me a moment, please.”
She picked up the receiver of her impressive multiline telephone and punched in a four-digit extension. “Owens,” she said, repeating the name for the third time. “Jonathan Owens… Cambridge Online Journal of Contemporary Art. Youngish chap… Yes, that’s him, Mr. Leach… Quite lovely manners.”
She hung up the phone and handed the young visitor a temporary guest identification badge, which he affixed to the lapel of his suit jacket.
“Third floor, dear. Turn left after you come off the lift.”
He stepped away from the receptionist’s desk and, after clearing a security checkpoint, boarded a waiting elevator. Alistair Leach was waiting in the doorway of his office. He regarded his visitor with a somewhat baleful expression, as though he were a debt collector, which, to some degree, he was.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Owens?”
Nigel Whitcombe closed the door and handed Leach the script.
“Think you can do it cold, Alistair, or do you want to run through it a time or two?”
“I do this for a living. I think I can manage it on my own.”
“You’re sure, Alistair? We have a lot of time and money invested in this. It’s important you not stumble over your delivery.”
Leach lifted the receiver of his telephone and dialed the number from memory. Ten seconds later, in the opinion of young Nigel Whitcombe, Gabriel’s operation truly took flight.
“Elena, darling. It’s Alistair Leach from Christie’s. Am I catching you at a perfectly dreadful time?”
He hadn’t, of course. In fact, at the moment her mobile rang, Elena Kharkov was having tea with her seven-year-old twins, Anna and Nikolai, at the café atop Harrods department store. She had arrived there after taking the children for a boat ride on the Serpentine in Hyde Park-an idyllic scene that might have been painted by Mary Cassatt herself were it not for the fact that Mrs. Kharkov and her children were shadowed the entire time by two additional boats filled with Russian bodyguards. They were with her now, seated at an adjacent table, next to several veiled Saudi women and their African servants. The telephone itself was in a rather smart Italian leather handbag; withdrawing it, she appeared to recognize the number in the caller ID screen and was already smiling when she lifted the phone to her ear. The conversation that followed was forty-nine seconds in length and was intercepted at multiple transmission points and by multiple services, including the U.S. National Security Agency, Britain’s GCHQ, and even by the Russian eavesdropping service, which made nothing of it. Gabriel and Graham Seymour listened to it live by means of a direct tap on Leach’s line at Christie’s. When the connection went dead, Gabriel looked at one of the technicians-Marlowe or Mapes, he could never be certain which was which-and asked him to play it again.