Ingrid had a closer look at the lock.
“Recognize it?” asked Gabriel.
She nodded. “It’s American made, secure but vulnerable. Like many electronic locks, the internal actuator can be manipulated from outside the safe with a magnet.”
“How powerful does it need to be?”
“A forty-by-twenty-millimeter rare-earth magnet should do the trick. Professional locksmiths call them hockey pucks. They’re referred to as permanent magnets because they’re so strong. And quite dangerous.” She glanced at Monjean. “Isn’t that right, René?”
He nodded knowingly. “A colleague crushed a finger using one of those things.”
“I hope it was worth it,” said Gabriel.
“A blue-and-white Tianqiuping vase.” Monjean smiled. “It fetched two million on the black market.”
“Any other options?” asked Gabriel.
“A computerized automatic dialer,” said Ingrid. “You attach it to the lock and let it run the numbers until it stumbles on the correct combination.”
“How long will it take?”
“Hard to say. Could be twelve minutes or twelve hours.”
“Can you lay your hands on one on short notice?”
“My friend in Grasse will sell me one, I’m sure.”
“Monsieur Giroux?” asked Monjean.
Ingrid frowned. “Perhaps Philippe should give us a guided tour of the entire office.”
It began in the fourth-floor reception area, with its stylish furnishings and artwork to match, and concluded in the fifth-floor conference room, where Ian Harris and Konrad Weber were at that moment meeting with a slick-looking creature with a chemically enhanced face and a price-available-upon-request suit. There was no audio, only video. The cameras, said Lambert, were concealed.
“How late do they work at night?” asked Gabriel.
“The firm’s office hours are ten to six, but one of the young associates always stays until nine.”
“Close of business in the British Virgin Islands?”
Lambert nodded.
“And the rest of the building?”
“It’s dead by then. As soon as the last lawyer leaves for the night, Ingrid and René will have the place to themselves. I’ll let them into the building and let them out again when it’s time to leave.”
“How’s the Internet here?”
“Rock-solid and surprisingly fast. Your friend has an excellent network.”
Gabriel turned to Monjean. “Escape route?”
“The French border is fifty meters to the west of the building, but my preference would be to leave by boat.”
“Can you reserve a berth in the port?”
“At this time of year?” Monjean shrugged to indicate it would not be a problem. “You can spend the evening listening to my new audio system while Ingrid and I steal the documents. And then we’ll all take a nice midnight cruise together to celebrate.”
Gabriel made to reply but stopped when he heard the sound of a car drawing up outside in the forecourt. The driver greeted Don Orsati’s security men in fluent corsu and then let himself into the villa. He wore a charcoal-gray suit by Richard Anderson of Savile Row, an open-neck white dress shirt, and handmade oxford shoes. His hair was sun-bleached, his skin was taut and dark, his eyes were bright blue. The notch in the center of his thick chin looked as though it had been cleaved with a chisel. His mouth seemed permanently fixed in an ironic half-smile.
“Well, well,” he said. “Isn’t this jolly.”
37
Haute-Corse
In the autumn of 1989, Gabriel reluctantly agreed to deliver a lecture in Tel Aviv to a visiting delegation of officers from the Special Air Service, Britain’s elite commando regiment. The topic was the April 1988 targeted killing of Abu Jihad, the PLO’s second-in-command, at his seaside villa in Tunis, an operation that Gabriel had carried out. At the conclusion of his presentation, he had posed for a photograph with the members of his audience, wearing a hat and sunglasses to conceal his identity. After the last picture was snapped, the handsome British officer standing next to him thrust out his hand and said, “My name’s Keller, by the way. Christopher Keller. I imagine we’ll be meeting again someday.”
From the moment he arrived at SAS headquarters in Herefordshire, it was obvious that Christopher was different. His scores in the Killing House, an infamous facility where recruits practice close-quarters combat and hostage rescue, were the highest ever recorded. His most remarkable achievement, though, was the time he posted for the Endurance, a forty-mile march across the windswept moorland known as the Brecon Beacons. Laden with a fifty-five-pound rucksack and a ten-pound assault rifle, Christopher shattered the course record by thirty minutes, a mark that stands to this day.
He was assigned to a Sabre squadron specializing in mobile desert warfare, but his intelligence and ability to improvise on his feet soon brought him to the attention of the SAS’s Special Reconnaissance Unit. After eight weeks of intense training, he arrived in war-torn Northern Ireland as a plainclothes surveillance specialist. The subtleties of local accents required most of his colleagues to utilize the services of a Fred—the unit’s term for a local helper—when tracking IRA members or engaging in street surveillance. But Christopher quickly developed the ability to mimic the various dialects of Ulster with the speed and confidence of a native. He could even switch accents at a moment’s notice—a Catholic from Armagh one minute, a Protestant from Belfast’s Shankill Road the next, then a Catholic from the Ballymurphy housing estates.
His unique combination of skills did not escape the notice of an ambitious young officer from T Branch, the Irish terrorism department of MI5. The officer, whose name was Graham Seymour, was unimpressed by the quality of intelligence he was receiving from MI5’s informants in Northern Ireland and was eager to insert an agent of his own. Christopher accepted the assignment, and two months later he slipped into West Belfast posing as a Catholic named Michael Connelly. He took a two-room flat in the Divis Tower apartment complex on the Falls Road and found work as a deliveryman for a laundry service. His neighbor, with whom he shared a cordial relationship, was a member of the IRA’s West Belfast Brigade.
An Anglican by birth, Christopher attended mass regularly at St. Paul’s Church, the IRA’s favorite house of worship. It was there, on a wet Sunday during the holy season of Lent, that he met Elizabeth Conlin, daughter of Ronnie Conlin, the IRA’s field commander for Ballymurphy. Their brief love affair would end with Elizabeth’s brutal murder and Christopher’s abduction. His interrogation took place at a farmhouse in South Armagh and was conducted by a senior IRA man called Eamon Quinn. Faced with the prospect of an appalling death, Christopher decided he had no recourse but to fight his way out. By the time he made his escape, four hardened terrorists from the Provisional Irish Republican Army were dead. Two had been virtually cut to pieces.
He returned to SAS headquarters at Hereford for what he thought would be a long rest, but his stay was cut short in August 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. He quickly rejoined his old Sabre unit and by January 1991 was in the western desert of Iraq, searching out the Scud missile launchers that were raining terror on Tel Aviv. On the night of January 28, his team located a launcher a hundred miles northwest of Baghdad and radioed the coordinates to their commanders in Saudi Arabia. Ninety minutes later a formation of Coalition fighter-bombers streaked low over the desert. But in a disastrous case of friendly fire, the aircraft attacked the SAS squadron instead of the Scud site. British officials concluded the entire unit was lost, including Christopher.
In truth, he had survived the incident without a scratch. His first instinct was to radio his base and request extraction. Instead, enraged by the incompetence of his superiors, he started walking. Concealed beneath the robe and headdress of a desert Arab, and highly trained in the art of clandestine movement, he made his way through the Coalition forces and slipped undetected into Syria.
