Silver

5

The old man grappled with his wheelchair, banging the steel rim off the doorframe as he negotiated the turn into one of the many downstairs rooms. He cursed the damned thing, reversed and twisted hard on the right wheel to make sure he made it through on the second attempt. There was no need for it; the wheelchair was electric. He could just as easily have angled it gracefully between the gap using the little joystick set into the armrest, but right now Sir Charles needed to look frustrated. To finish playing the part, he needed to take that “frustration” out with sheer physical exertion. Anything else would have given his satisfaction away.

He slammed the door behind him.

And then he smiled the smile of a man content that he had achieved exactly what he had set out to.

The room was yet another different world within the confines of Nonesuch. It was part study, part retreat. This was the old man’s haven. There was an antique pedestal desk with green leather inlay and matching green glass banker’s lamp and blotter. The pedestals were chipped and scuffed where he had caught them with the wheelchair. Above the desk was a mirror. Reflected in the mirror was a Rembrandt, brooding and dark with thick, heavy oils. The painting was priceless-or more accurately, beyond pricing-because the rest of the world believed it to be among the lost treasures of the art world, a variant on his 1629 masterpiece Judas Repentant. The painting had fascinated Sir Charles, as had the very notion that there could be no rehabilitation for the penitent sinner. What was it Peter had called Judas’ repentance? He remembered: The sorrow of a world which worketh death.

It was getting progressively more difficult to recall the little things, the ephemera of life, which frightened Sir Charles. The idea of his mental acuity slipping into darkness was terrifying. He’d promised himself he would shuffle off this mortal coil if he ever forgot his own name. It wasn’t a promise he was sure he could keep. That was his sorrow. Age.

He studied the painting for the thousandth time. Everything in it appeared to represent genuine shame-the hand-wringing, which mirrored so many portraits of Peter the sinner, the facial expression, even the damage where Judas had been tearing his hair out. They were all classic representations of shame. The difference between this and the original lay in the coins. In the original Judas had been painted as unable to look away from the silver. In this, he offered the blood money up to Mary Magdalene, looking at her with hope, even love, in his eyes. He wasn’t groveling for mercy. Instead, there was a discomforting beauty and truth to the painting that had owned Sir Charles’ soul since he first laid eyes upon it.

He was a boy when his father had taken him to see it hanging in Jacques Goudstikker’s Gallerie in Paris.

It had hung there until the German occupation when, like so many other works of art, it was spirited away into Hermann Goring’s personal collection and thought lost forever in the many vaults beneath the Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich.

After decades of litigation, threat and negotiation, a number of paintings had been recovered, but the process was made all the more difficult. Jacques Goudstikker had left his widow, Marei, a typewritten inventory, but without death certificates the Swiss bankers refused to turn over the treasures gathering dust in their vaults.

Of course, Auschwitz, Belsen and Treblinka hadn’t been in the habit of issuing death certificates for the Jews they gassed.

It was all a face-saving exercise for the Swiss, who of course, vociferously denied any wrongdoing.

Sir Charles had managed to secure a copy of Marei Goudstikker’s list. The interpretation of Judas Repentant, known as The Adoration of Silver, or more simply, Silver, wasn’t on that inventory. Its absence had, in part, been the reason behind his obsession with lost treasures.

It had taken him the best part of a decade to grease the right palms, who, in turn, knew the right vault to crack open. Smuggling the Rembrandt out of the country after that had been a comparatively easy task. And now it hung above his desk, a constant reminder that there were two sides to every story, even the best known of all. He had made arrangements for the painting’s return to the heirs of its rightful owner upon his death. That, too, was the kind of man he was.

The rest of the room was dominated by a huge orthopedic bed. Again the mahogany frame was scarred where the chair had caught it again and again. Angels, demons and so many creatures of nightmare were beautifully rendered in the frieze that decorated the headboard. Sir Charles had discovered the carving in Palermo and had it shipped to Nonesuch, where he had employed a seventy-year-old artisan to craft the art from a thing of curious beauty into the bed where he intended to die.

There was a green oxygen tank beside the neatly made bed, a clear, plastic mask hanging from the closed valve. The third wall was dominated by more books. Beneath the window an exquisitely hand-carved globe caught the moonlight. It was the oldest thing in the room, the contours of its map hopelessly wrong in this world of GPS and satellite navigation. It was filled with places that had long since slipped off modern maps and into mythology: Hy-Brazil, Hawaiki, Nibiru, Lemuria, Ys, Thule and more. Places that were filled with mystery and promise, lost, like Rembrandt’s Silver.

Perhaps, he thought, and not for the first time, they too could be found? There was something curiously soothing about tilting at windmills like Quixote.

Sir Charles angled the chair between the bed and the wall, fastened the mask over his face and breathed deeply as the pure oxygen flooded into his lungs. After several purifying breaths he shut off the valve and hung the mask up again. He closed his eyes. He had always intended that Orla would head up the investigation in Israel. Anything else, as she had so vehemently put it, was a waste of her talents-but he was all too aware of what had happened to her out there. It had to be her choice to return to that forsaken land.

The old man drummed his fingers on the arm of the wheelchair. The rhythm sounded like the funeral march of Geppetto’s wooden toys. His nails clacked and clinked and thunked against the leather, steel and wood. He found his thoughts drifting.

He hadn’t been there for Orla’s debriefing, but he’d read Orla’s file a thousand times since.

He knew all of the intimate details of Tel Aviv and exactly what had happened to her. Knowing didn’t make it any less potent. It didn’t purge or cleanse or offer redemption or retribution.

She had been taken during the second Intifada. After a series of suicide attacks the IDF believed stemmed from the Palestinian camp, she had gone in. They were after Mahmoud Tawalbe, a father of two who owned a record store. He also headed an Islamic Jihad cell and was responsible for a string of deaths through suicide bombings at Haifa and Hadera. Intelligence suggested Thabet Mardawi and Ali Suleiman al-Saadi, two other top-level Islamic Jihadists were also sheltering in the camp.

Orla’s brief had been simple: infiltrate the refugee camp, establish the presence of the primary and secondary targets, and get out. She made her reports, but she didn’t get out. She was dragged away from the makeshift streets of the encampment to the heart of Jenin, the Hawashin district, as the first assault hit on the morning of April 2, 2002. Explosions triggered by the bulldozers as they rolled in buried the sound of her screams.

They had told her she was already dead, that there was no place in heaven for her soul, but promised to keep her alive one more night if she gave herself up to them. They used her. Every night they made the same promise, one more night. They kept her for nine days, and though time lost all meaning for her, she suspected that at least five people raped her every night. Often it was two or three at a time, sometimes one man came alone. She didn’t fight them. They would beat her, enjoying her pain. They would taunt her, goading her to tears. They would abuse her, violate her. But they refused to kill her even when she begged. Somehow she had made it through, night after night, until the IDF “liberated” the camp.

She hadn’t worked for four months when Sir Charles rescued her. The annotation in her service record said simply: Torture victim. Unstable. Suggest continued observation. If no change in subsequent months recommend transfer out of active service.

In less clinical words, Orla Nyren was the quintessential “damaged goods” that could quite easily keep a psychiatrist fed and watered for years.

That didn’t change the fact that during their few years together Sir Charles had grown to think of Orla as the daughter he’d never had. He knew her as well as anyone could, and that natural paternal instinct drove him to at least try and protect her, despite the fact that doing so only served to rile her all the more. His gut instinct had been to send Noah with her. Of all of them Noah was the one he would have entrusted with her life because it was so obvious he shared the same adoration the old man did. Without question, Noah would take a bullet for Orla. But Noah Larkin was every bit as damaged in his ownway as she was, and just as likely to get them taken down a dark alley and shot as he was to save the day.

He had deliberately stressed Konstantin’s qualifications for the Berlin leg of the operation: his familiarity with the city, with the mindset of the people, his network of contacts from both before the wall fell and after. Everything he had said could equally be applied to Orla and Israel, he’d made quite sure of that. The only difference was their relationships with the places. For Konstantin Berlin mean freedom; for Orla Israel meant torture. And because of that, he had been worried she was going to sit back meekly and let Frost take the Israel assignment. He couldn’t begin to imagine the conflict going on inside her mind as she listened to him give her city away. The war of emotions, guilt, relief, anger.

It had been such a relief to see the fire back in her belly. He’d even enjoyed her calling him on his pigheadedness like that, even though on the surface it meant losing face with the others. Frost had been around the block often enough to grasp Sir Charles’ game, and Lethe was too in awe of the whole spy culture they had going on to dare jeopardize his place in it. Noah was Noah. Unpredictable. Difficult to read. Konstantin was different. He came from a culture that respected power, even when that power was incontrovertibly wrong. Still, he had fled for a reason. So even the Russian would find something admirable in the old man being persuaded by her arguments. In truth her flare up only served to cement his position rather than undermine it.

He looked at the grandfather clock, with its tarnished brass pendulum swinging slowly to and fro, tick, tock, tick, tock. It made time sound so real, so vital. He heard Maxwell ushering them out, heard Noah saying something deliberately antagonistic to him, the car doors slam and then a moment later the peel of tires spitting gravel as the Daimler accelerated toward the airfield. They would be in the air in twenty minutes and halfway to Berlin, their first stop, before the sun was full in the sky.

How many hours did they have until the first attack? He knew he should have handed everything they had over to MI6. It was stupid not to. But it was 4 a.m. There was nothing the spooks could do that his people couldn’t. Indeed, free of the constraints of protocols and hierarchy, there was plenty the Forge Team could do that an MI6 operative legitimately couldn’t.

He was tired. There were still a few hours until dawn, and as he had told the others, these few hours might well be their last chance to sleep soundly for the foreseeable future.

Undressing, something that he had taken for granted for so long, was a physical trial. He was gasping and panting as he heaved himself out of the wheelchair and levered himself onto the hard mattress. There was nothing graceful about it. He writhed and wriggled like a beached whale trying to get beneath the covers. Sweat peppered his skin. He lay there staring up at the ceilg. Sleep did not come.

The sun did.