The Heist (19 page)

B
UT THERE WAS ONE CONDITION
: Sam reserved the right to choose the time and place of the exchange of money and merchandise. The time, he said, would be half past eleven the following evening. The place would be a warehouse in Chelles, a drab commune east of Paris. Keller drove there the next morning while the rest of northern France was streaming toward the city center. The warehouse was where Sam had said it would be, on the avenue François Mitterrand, directly across the street from a Renault dealership. A faded sign read
EUROTRANZ
, though there was no indication of precisely the sort of services the company provided. Pigeons flew in and out of the broken windows; a savanna of weeds flourished behind the bars of the iron fence. Keller climbed out of his car and inspected the automatic gate. It had been a long time since anyone had opened it.

He spent an hour carrying out a routine reconnaissance assessment of the streets surrounding the warehouse and then drove north to the farmhouse at Andeville. When he arrived, he found Gabriel and Chiara relaxing in the sunlit garden. The two van Goghs were propped against the wall in the living room.

“I still don’t know how you can tell them apart,” Keller said.

“It’s rather obvious, don’t you think?”

“No, I don’t.”

Gabriel inclined his head toward the painting on the right. “You’re sure?”

“Those are my fingerprints on the sides of the stretcher bars, not Vincent’s. And then there’s this.”

Gabriel powered on his Office-issued BlackBerry and held it near the top right corner of the canvas. The screen flashed red, indicating the presence of a concealed transmitter.

“You’re sure about the range?” asked Keller.

“I tested it again this morning. It’s rock solid at ten kilometers.”

Keller looked at the genuine van Gogh. “Too bad no one thought to put a tracker in that one.”

“Yes,” said Gabriel distantly.

“How long do you intend to keep it?”

“Not a day longer than necessary.”

“Who’s going to hold on to it while we chase the forgery?”

“I was hoping to leave it in the Paris embassy,” said Gabriel, “but the station chief won’t touch it. So I had to make other arrangements.”

“What sort of arrangements?”

When Gabriel answered, Keller shook his head slowly.

“It’s a bit odd, don’t you think?”

“Life is complicated, Christopher.”

Keller smiled. “Tell me about it.”

They left the quaint farmhouse for the last time at eight that evening. The copy of
Sunflowers
was in the trunk of Keller’s Mercedes; the authentic van Gogh was in Gabriel’s. He delivered it to Maurice Durand at his shop on the rue de Miromesnil. Then he dropped Chiara at the safe flat overlooking the Pont Marie and set out for the commune of Chelles.

He arrived a few minutes before eleven and made his way to the warehouse on the avenue François Mitterrand. It was in a section of town where there was little life on the streets after dark. He circled the property twice, looking for evidence of surveillance or anything that suggested Keller was about to walk into a trap. Finding nothing out of the ordinary, he went in search of a suitable observation post where a man sitting alone wouldn’t attract the attention of the gendarmes. The only option was a brown park where a dozen local skateboard toughs were drinking beer. On one side of the park was a row of benches lit by yellow streetlamps. Gabriel parked his car on the street and sat on the bench closest to the entrance of Eurotranz. The toughs looked at him quizzically for a moment before resuming their discussion of the day’s pressing affairs. Gabriel glanced at his wristwatch. It was five minutes past eleven. Then he consulted his BlackBerry. The beacon was not yet in range.

Looking up again, he saw the headlamps of a car on the avenue. A small red Citröen, it shot past the entrance of Eurotranz and sped along the edge of the park, leaving in its wake the throb of French hip-hop. Behind it was another car, a black BMW, so clean it looked newly washed for the occasion. It stopped at the gate and the driver climbed out. In the darkness it was impossible to see his face, but in build and movement he was Sam’s doppelganger.

He jabbed his forefinger at the keypad a few times with the confidence of a man who had known the combination for a long time. Then he climbed behind the wheel again, waited for the gate to open, and drove onto the property. He paused while the gate closed behind him and then approached the entrance of the warehouse. Again, he emerged from the car and stabbed at the security keypad with a speed that suggested familiarity. When the door rolled open, he eased the car inside and disappeared from sight.

In the little brown park, the arrival of a luxury automobile at the disused warehouse on the avenue François Mitterrand went unnoticed by everyone except for the man of late middle age sitting alone. The man glanced at his wristwatch and saw that it was 11:08. Then he looked at his BlackBerry. The red light was blinking and heading his way.

Keller arrived promptly at eleven thirty. He rang Sam’s mobile and the gate swung open. A patch of cracked asphalt stretched before him, empty, darkened. He drove across it slowly and, following Sam’s instructions, nosed the car into the warehouse. At the opposite end of a football-pitch-size space glowed the parking lamps of a BMW. Keller could make out the figure of a man leaning against the hood, a phone to his ear, two large suitcases at his feet. There was no one else visible.

“Stop there,” said Sam.

Keller put a foot on the brake.

“Turn off the engine and switch off your headlamps.”

Keller did as instructed.

“Get out of the car and stand where I can see you.”

Keller climbed out slowly and stood in front of the hood. Sam reached inside his BMW and switched on the headlamps.

“Take off your coat.”

“Is this really necessary?”

“Do you want the money or not?”

Keller removed his coat and tossed it on the hood of his car.

“Turn around and face the car.”

Keller hesitated, then turned his back to Sam.

“Very good.”

Keller rotated slowly to face Sam again.

“Where’s the painting?”

“In the trunk.”

“Take it out and put it on the ground twenty feet in front of the car.”

Keller opened the trunk using the inside latch release and removed the painting. It was sheathed in a protective layer of glassine paper and concealed by a contractor-grade rubbish bag. He placed it on the concrete floor of the warehouse twenty paces in front of the Mercedes and waited for Sam’s next instruction.

“Walk back to your car,” came the voice from the opposite end of the space.

“Not a chance,” Keller replied into the glare of Sam’s headlamps.

A brief impasse occurred. Then Sam came forward through the light. He stopped a few feet away from Keller, looked down, and frowned.

“I need to see it one more time.”

“Then I suggest you remove the plastic wrapper. But do it carefully, Sam. If anything happens to that painting, I’m going to hold you responsible.”

Sam crouched and removed the canvas from the bag. Then he turned the image toward the headlamps of his car and squinted at the brushwork and the signature.

“Well?” asked Keller.

Sam looked at the fingerprints along the sides of the stretcher bars, then at the museum markings on the back. “In a moment,” he said quietly. “In a moment.”

Keller’s car emerged from the warehouse at 11:40. The gate was open by the time he arrived. He turned to the right and sped past the bench where Gabriel sat. Gabriel ignored him; he was watching the taillights of a BMW moving off along the avenue François Mitterrand. He looked down at his BlackBerry and smiled. They were on, he thought. They were definitely on.

The red light of the beacon blinked with the regularity of a heartbeat. It floated through the remaining Paris suburbs and then raced eastward along the A4 toward Reims. Gabriel followed a kilometer behind, and Keller followed a kilometer behind Gabriel. They spoke on the phone only once, a brief conversation during which Keller confirmed that the deal had gone through without a hitch. Sam had the painting; Keller had Sam’s money. It was hidden in the trunk of the car, inside the trash bag that Gabriel had placed around the copy of
Sunflowers.
All except for a single bundle of hundred-euro notes, which was tucked into the pocket of Keller’s coat.

“Why is it in your pocket?” asked Gabriel.

“Gas money,” replied Keller.

One hundred and twenty kilometers separated the eastern suburbs of Paris from Reims, a distance that Sam covered in little more than an hour. Just beyond the city, the red light came suddenly to a stop along the A4. Gabriel quickly closed the gap and saw Sam filling his car with gas at a roadside service station. He immediately rang Keller and told him to pull over; then he waited until Sam was once again on the road. Within a few moments, the three cars had resumed their original formation: Sam in the lead, Gabriel following a kilometer behind Sam, and Keller following a kilometer behind Gabriel.

From Reims, they pushed farther eastward, through Verdun and Metz. Then the A4 bent to the south and carried them to Strasbourg, the capital of the Alsace region of France and the seat of the European Parliament. At the edge of the city flowed the gray-green waters of the Rhine. A few minutes after sunrise, 25 million euros in cash and a copy of a stolen masterpiece by Vincent van Gogh crossed undetected into Germany.

The first city on the German side of the border was Kehl, and beyond Kehl was the A5 autobahn. Sam followed it as far as Karlsruhe; then he turned onto the A8 and headed toward Stuttgart. By the time he reached the southeastern suburbs, the morning rush was at its worst. He crawled into the city along the Hauptstätterstrasse and made his way to Stuttgart-Mitte, a pleasant district of offices and shops at the heart of the sprawling metropolis. Gabriel sensed that Sam was nearing his final destination, so he closed to within a few hundred meters. And then the one thing happened that he expected least.

The blinking red light vanished from his screen.

According to Gabriel’s BlackBerry, the beacon transmitted its dying electronic impulse at Böheimstrasse 8. The address corresponded to a gray stucco hotel that looked as though it had been imported from East Berlin during the darkest days of the Cold War. At the back of the hotel, reached by an alleyway, was a public parking garage. The BMW was on the lowest level, in a corner where the overhead light had been smashed. Sam was slumped over the wheel, eyes frozen open, blood and brain tissue spattered across the inside of the windshield. And
Sunflowers
, oil on canvas, 95 by 73 centimeters, by Gabriel Allon, was gone.

T
HEY LEFT
S
TUTTGART BY THE
same route they had entered it and crossed back into France at Strasbourg. Keller headed for Corsica; Gabriel, for Geneva. He arrived in midafternoon and immediately rang Christoph Bittel from a public phone along the lakeshore. The secret policeman didn’t sound pleased to hear from him again so soon. He was even less pleased when Gabriel explained why he was back in town.

“Out of the question,” he said.

“Then I suppose I’ll have to tell the world about all those stolen paintings I found in that vault.”

“So much for the new Gabriel Allon.”

“What time should I expect you, Bittel?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

It took Bittel an hour to clear his desk at NDB headquarters and another two hours to make the drive from Bern down to Geneva. Gabriel was waiting for him on a busy street corner along the rue du Rhône. It was a few minutes after six. Tidy Swiss moneymen were spilling from the handsome office blocks; pretty girls and slick foreigners were streaming into the glittering cafés. It was all very orderly. Even mass murderers minded their manners when they came to Geneva.

“You were about to tell me why I’m supposed to open that safe for you,” Bittel said as he eased back into the evening traffic with his usual overabundance of caution.

“Because the operation I’m running hit a snag, and for the moment I have nowhere else to turn.”

“What kind of snag?”

“A dead body.”

“Where?”

Gabriel hesitated.

“Where?” asked Bittel again.

“Stuttgart,” replied Gabriel.

“I suppose it was that Arab who was shot in the head this morning in the city center?”

“Who said he was an Arab?”

“The BfV.”

The BfV was Germany’s internal security service. It maintained close relations with its Alemannic brethren in Bern.

“How much do they have on him?” asked Gabriel.

“Almost nothing, which is why they reached out to us. It seems the killers took his wallet after they shot him.”

“That wasn’t all they took.”

“Were you responsible for his death?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Let me put it to you this way, Allon. Did you put a gun to his head and pull the trigger?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“It’s not such a far-fetched question. After all, you do have something of a track record when it comes to dead bodies on European soil.”

Gabriel made no reply.

“Do you know the name of the man who was inside the car at the time?”

“He called himself Sam, but I have a feeling his real name was Samir.”

“Last name?”

“I never caught it.”

“Passport?”

“He spoke French very well. If I had to guess, he was from the Levant.”

“Lebanon?”

“Maybe. Or maybe Syria.”

“Why was he killed?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You can do better than that, Allon.”

“It’s possible he was in possession of a painting that looked a great deal like
Sunflowers
by Vincent van Gogh.”

“The one that was stolen from Amsterdam?”

“Borrowed,” said Gabriel.

“Who painted the forgery?”

“I did.”

“Why did Sam have it?”

“I sold it to him for twenty-five million euros.”