Isherwood saw the young man to the door, then, in the privacy of his washroom, unsealed the envelope. Inside was a brief note. Isherwood read it once, then a second time, just to be sure. Leaning against the basin to steady himself, he was overcome by an immense wave of relief. Though Gabriel had not found the painting, his investigation had produced a critical piece of information. Isherwood's original search of the painting's provenance had failed to reveal it had been stolen during the Second World War. Therefore the rightful owner of the painting was not the mysterious unnamed client of David Cavendish but an elderly woman in Amsterdam. For Julian Isherwood, the discovery meant that the cloud of financial ruin had been lifted. Typically, matters involving looted art might be litigated for years. But Isherwood knew from experience that no decent court in the world would ever force him to compensate a man for a painting that was not rightly his. The Rembrandt was still missing and might never be found. But, simply put, Isherwood was now off the hook.

His relief, however, was soon followed by a pang of deep guilt. Guilt over the tragedy of the Herzfeld family, a story Isherwood understood all too well. Guilt over the fate of Christopher Liddell, who had sacrificed his life trying to protect the Rembrandt. And guilt, too, over the present circumstances of one Gabriel Allon. It seemed Gabriel's quest to recover the painting had earned him a powerful new enemy. And once more it seemed he had fallen under the spell of Ari Shamron. Or perhaps, thought Isherwood, it was the other way around.

Isherwood read the note a final time, then as instructed touched it to the open flame of a match. In an instant, the paper vanished in a burst of fire that left no trace of ash. Isherwood returned to his office, hands shaking, and gingerly sat at his desk. You might have warned me about the flash paper, petal, he thought. Nearly stopped my bloody heart.

The operation began in earnest when Gabriel and Chiara arrived at Room 456C. A subterranean chamber located three levels beneath the lobby of King Saul Boulevard, it had once been a dumping ground for obsolete computers and worn-out furniture, often used by the night staff for romantic trysts. Now it was known throughout the Office only as Gabriel's Lair.

A strip of bluish fluorescent light shone from beneath the closed door, and from the opposite side came the expectant murmur of voices. Gabriel smiled at Chiara, then punched the code into the pad and led her inside. For a few seconds, none of the nine people sprawled around the dilapidated worktables seemed to notice their presence. Then a single face turned, and there arose a loud cheer. When the cacophony finally subsided, Gabriel and Chiara made their way slowly around the room, greeting each member of the fabled team.

There was Yossi Gavish, a tweedy, Oxford-educated analyst from Research, and Yaakov Rossman, a pockmarked former officer from Shabak's Arab Affairs Department who was now running agents into Syria. There was Dina Sarid, a terrorism specialist from History who seemed to carry the grief of her work wherever she went, and Rimona Stern, a former military intelligence officer who happened to be Shamron's niece by marriage and was now assigned to the Office's special Iran task force. There were Mordecai and Oded, a pair of all-purpose fieldhands, and two computer sleuths from Technical of whom it was said no database or server in the world was safe. And there was Eli Lavon, who had flown in from Amsterdam the previous evening after turning over the Lena Herzfeld watch to a local security team.

Within the corridors and conference rooms of King Saul Boulevard, these men and women were known by the code name Barak—the Hebrew word for lightning—because of their ability to gather and strike quickly. They had operated together, often under conditions of immense stress, on secret battlefields from Moscow to the Caribbean. But one member of the team was not present. Gabriel looked at Yossi and asked, "Where's Mikhail?"

"He was on a leave of absence."

"Where is he now?"

"Standing right behind you," said a voice at Gabriel's back.

Gabriel turned around. Propped against the jamb was a lanky figure with eyes the color of glacial ice and a fine-boned, bloodless face. Born in Moscow to a pair of dissident scientists, Mikhail Abramov had come to Israel as a teenager within weeks of the Soviet Union's collapse. Once described by Shamron as "Gabriel without a conscience," Mikhail had joined the Office after serving in the Sayeret Matkal special forces, where he had assassinated several of the top terrorist masterminds of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. But he would forever be linked to Gabriel and Chiara by the terrifying hours they had spent together in the hands of Ivan Kharkov in a birch forest outside Moscow.

"I thought you were supposed to be in Cornwall," Mikhail said.

"I got a little stir-crazy."

"So I hear."

"Are you up for this?"

Mikhail shrugged. "No problem."

Mikhail took his usual seat in the back left corner while Gabriel surveyed the four walls. They were papered over with surveillance photos, street maps, and watch reports—all corresponding to the eleven names Gabriel had written on the chalk-board the previous summer. Eleven names of eleven former KGB agents, all of whom had been killed by Gabriel and Mikhail. Now Gabriel wiped the names from the board with the same ease he had wiped the Russians from the face of the earth and in their place adhered an enlarged photograph of Martin Landesmann. Then he settled atop a metal stool and told his team a story.

It was a story of greed, dispossession, and death spanning more than half a century and stretching from Amsterdam to Zurich to Buenos Aires and back to the graceful shores of Lake Geneva. It featured a long-hidden portrait by Rembrandt, a twice-stolen fortune in looted Holocaust assets, and a man known to all the world as Saint Martin who was anything but. Like a painting, said Gabriel, Saint Martin was merely a clever illusion. Beneath the shimmering varnish and immaculate brushwork of his surface were base layers of shadows and lies. And perhaps there was an entire hidden work waiting to be brought to the surface. They were going to attack Saint Martin by focusing on his lies. Where there was one, Gabriel said, there would be others. They were like loose threads at the edge of an otherwise undamaged canvas. Pull on the right one, Gabriel promised, and Saint Martin's world would fall to pieces.

They divided his life in half, which Martin, had he known of their efforts, would surely have found appropriate. Dina, Rimona, Mordecai, and Chiara were given responsibility for his highly guarded personal life and his philanthropic work while the rest of the team took on the Herculean task of deconstructing his far-flung financial empire. Their goal was to find evidence that Saint Martin knew his astonishing wealth had been built upon a great crime. Eli Lavon, a battle-scarred veteran of many such investigations, privately despaired of their chances for success. The case against Landesmann, while compelling to a layman, was based largely on the fading memories of a few participants. Without original documentation from Bank Landesmann or an admission of guilt from Saint Martin himself, any allegations of wrongdoing might ultimately be impossible to prove. But as Gabriel reminded Lavon time and time again, he was not necessarily looking for legal proof, only a hammer that he might use to beat down the doors of Saint Martin's citadel.