She had felt the same way about her most recent love interest, a divorced father of two called Adam who worked for the Department of Health. But Adam quickly came to resent the fact that she spent eighteen hours a day on the phone or in front of a computer. So had all of Adam’s predecessors, including Samantha’s ex-husband, who was long remarried and leading a blissful upper-middle-class existence in leafy Richmond. Samantha shared a flat in Primrose Hill with her cat and lived in fear that, given the precarious state of the journalism business, she might soon find herself out of a job. Her friends from university had all gone to work in the financial sector and made gobs of money. But Samantha had been determined to do something out of the ordinary. Now, as she watched the slow rotation of the London Eye, she could at least take comfort in the knowledge that she had achieved her goal.
The bench was located next to the Battle of Britain memorial. It had been chosen by the author of the text message, whom Samantha surmised was a well-educated man of late middle age, a description that applied to a significant portion of the British political establishment. He had instructed her to arrive at six o’clock. But Big Ben was now tolling the bottom of the hour, and there was still no sign of him—or the promised documents.
Annoyed, Samantha drew her mobile phone and typed, I’m waiting.
The anonymous leaker replied instantly. Patience.
Not my strong suit, answered Samantha. Now or never.
Just then she heard the clatter of high heels over paving stones and, glancing to her right, saw a woman walking toward her from the direction of Westminster. She was not yet thirty, blond, professionally dressed, quite pretty. Her head was turned toward the Thames, as though she were admiring the view, and in her left hand was an A4 envelope. A moment later the same envelope was lying on the unoccupied half of the bench. The young woman, having dropped it there, continued northward along the embankment and disappeared from Samantha’s view.
Her phone pinged at once. Aren’t you going to open it?
Samantha looked left and right along the embankment but could see no one who appeared to be watching her. The next message she received confirmed that, indeed, someone was.
Well, Ms. Cooke?
The envelope was lying face down on the bench. Samantha turned it over and saw the pale blue logo of the Conservative Party. The flap was unsealed, and inside was a sheaf of internal documents dealing with the Party’s fundraising efforts—one large political contribution in particular. The documents appeared to be authentic. They were also political dynamite.
Samantha took up her phone and typed, Are these genuine?
You know they are, came the reply.
Where do you work?
A moment passed before he answered. CCHQ.
CCHQ was the Conservative Campaign Headquarters. It was located in Matthew Parker Street, not far from the Palace of Westminster.
Samantha typed her next message and tapped the send icon. I need to see you at once.
Not possible, Ms. Cooke.
At least tell me who you are. I promise not to reveal your identity.
You may refer to me as Nemo.
Nemo, thought Samantha. No one.
She returned the documents to the envelope and rang Clive Randolph, the Telegraph’s political editor. “Someone just gave me the means to bring down Prime Minister Hillary Edwards. Are you interested?”
9
Musée du Louvre
Gabriel spent the night at the Godolphin Hotel in Marazion and was back in central London by one the following afternoon. He dropped his car at Hertz and his gun at Isherwood Fine Arts and boarded a Eurostar train bound for Paris. Three hours later he was extracting himself from the back of a taxi outside the Louvre. Naomi Wallach, as promised, was waiting next to the pyramid. They had spoken only briefly while Gabriel was hurtling across the fields of northern France. Now, in the fading light of the Louvre’s Cour Napoléon, she regarded him carefully, as though trying to decide whether he was a clever forgery or the real thing.
“You’re not at all what I expected,” she said at last.
“I hope you’re not disappointed.”
“Pleasantly surprised.” She removed a packet of cigarettes from her handbag and lit one. “You mentioned that you were a friend of Hannah Weinberg.”
“A close friend.”
“She never spoke of you.”
“At my request.”
The late Hannah Weinberg had been the director of the Weinberg Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism in France. Located on the rue des Rosiers in the Marais, the center was the target of one of the deadliest terrorist attacks carried out by the Islamic State. Naomi Wallach, a Holocaust restitution specialist focusing on issues related to art, should have been among the dead and wounded. But she was running late that morning and arrived to find the building ablaze and her friend Hannah lying in the ruins. A photograph of the two women, one brutally murdered, the other tearing at her garment in anguish, would become the atrocity’s defining image. Consequently, when the director of the Louvre was looking for an outsider to at long last purge the museum’s collection of looted works of art, Naomi Wallach was judged to be the perfect candidate.
She turned her head and expelled a stream of smoke. “Forgive me, Monsieur Allon. A filthy habit, I know.”
“There are worse.”
“Name one.”
“Buying a painting that belonged to someone who perished in the Holocaust.”
“A great many Frenchmen were afflicted with this habit during the war, including a curator from this very museum.”
“The curator’s name,” said Gabriel, “was René Huyghe.”
Naomi Wallach regarded him over the ember of her cigarette. “It sounds to me as though you know a good deal about the Nazi looting of France.”
“I am by no means an expert on the subject. But I was involved in a case many years ago that led to the recovery of a considerable number of looted paintings.”
“Where did you find them?”
