LITMIR.BIZ

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      “You don’t drink at lunch?”

      Not anymore, but she was sorely tempted to renounce her vow of daytime abstinence.

      “I’m going to London,” blurted Boswell.

      “Really? When?”

      “Tomorrow evening.”

      Not soon enough, thought Sarah.

      “You studied there, didn’t you?”

      “The Courtauld,” said Sarah with a defensive nod. She had no desire to spend lunch reviewing her curriculum vitae. It was, like the size of her expense account, well known within the New York art world. At least a portion of it.

      A graduate of Dartmouth College, Sarah Bancroft had studied art history at the famed Courtauld Institute of Art in London before earning her PhD from Harvard. Her costly education, funded exclusively by her father, an investment banker from Citigroup, won her a curator’s position at the Phillips Collection in Washington, for which she was paid next to nothing. She left the Phillips under ambiguous circumstances and, like a Picasso purchased at auction by a mysterious Japanese buyer, disappeared from public view. During this period she worked for the Central Intelligence Agency and undertook a pair of dangerous undercover assignments on behalf of a legendary Israeli operative named Gabriel Allon. She was now nominally employed by the Museum of Modern Art, where she oversaw the museum’s primary attraction—an astonishing $5 billion collection of Modern and Impressionist works from the estate of the late Nadia al-Bakari, daughter of the fabulously wealthy Saudi investor Zizi al-Bakari.

      Which went some way to explaining why Sarah was having lunch with the likes of Brady Boswell in the first place. Sarah had recently agreed to lend several lesser works from the collection to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Brady Boswell wanted to be next in line. It wasn’t in the cards, and Boswell knew it. His museum lacked the necessary prominence and pedigree. And so, after finally placing their lunch orders, he postponed the inevitable rejection with small talk. Sarah was relieved. She didn’t like confrontation. She’d had enough of it to last a lifetime. Two, in fact.

      “I heard a naughty rumor about you the other day.”

      “Only one?”

      Boswell smiled.

      “And what was the topic of this rumor?”

      “That you’ve been doing a bit of moonlighting.”

      Trained in the art of deception, Sarah easily concealed her discomfort. “Really? What sort of moonlighting?”

      Boswell leaned forward and lowered his voice to a confiding whisper. “That you’re KBM’s secret art adviser.” KBM were the internationally recognized initials of Saudi Arabia’s future king. “That you were the one who let him spend a half billion dollars on that questionable Leonardo.”

      “It’s not a questionable Leonardo.”

      “So it’s true!”

      “Don’t be ridiculous, Brady.”

      “A non-denial denial,” he replied with justifiable suspicion.

      Sarah raised her right hand as though swearing a solemn oath. “I am not now, nor have I ever been, an art adviser to one Khalid bin Mohammed.”

      Boswell was clearly dubious. Over antipasti he finally broached the topic of the loan. Sarah feigned dispassion before informing Boswell that under no circumstances would she be lending him a single painting from the al-Bakari Collection.

      “What about a Monet or two? Or one of the Cézannes?”

      “Sorry, but it’s out of the question.”

      “A Rothko? You have so many, you wouldn’t miss it.”

      “Brady, please.”

      They finished their lunch agreeably and parted on the pavements of Park Avenue. Sarah decided to walk back to the museum. Winter had finally arrived in Manhattan after one of the warmest autumns in memory. Heaven only knew what the new year might bring. The planet seemed to be lurching between extremes. Sarah, too. Secret soldier in the global war on terror one day, caretaker of one of the world’s grandest art collections the next. Her life knew no middle ground.

      But as Sarah turned onto East Fifty-Third Street, she realized quite suddenly she was terminally bored. She was the envy of the museum world, it was true. But the Nadia al-Bakari Collection, for all its glamour and the initial buzz of its opening, largely saw to itself. Sarah was little more than its attractive public face. Lately, she had been having too many lunches with men like Brady Boswell.

      In the meantime her private life had languished. Somehow, despite a busy schedule of fund-raisers and receptions, she had failed to meet a man of appropriate age or professional accomplishment. Oh, she met many men in their early forties, but they had no interest in a long-term relationship—God, how she hated the phrase—with a woman of commensurate age. Men in their early forties wanted a nubile nymphet of twenty-three, one of those languorous creatures who paraded around Manhattan with their leggings and their yoga mats. Sarah feared she was entering the realm of a second wifedom. In her darkest moments she saw herself on the arm of a wealthy man of sixty-three who dyed his hair and received regular injections of Botox and testosterone. The children from his first marriage would cast Sarah as a home-wrecker and despise her. After prolonged fertility treatments, she and her aging husband would manage to have a single child, which Sarah, after her husband’s tragic death while making his fourth attempt to scale Everest, would raise alone.

      The hum of the crowds in MoMA’s atrium temporarily lifted Sarah’s spirits. The Nadia al-Bakari Collection was on the second floor; Sarah’s office, the fourth. Her telephone log showed twelve missed calls. It was the usual fare—press inquiries, invitations to cocktail parties and gallery openings, a reporter from a scandal sheet looking for gossip.

      The last message was from someone called Alistair Macmillan. It seemed Mr. Macmillan wanted a private after-hours tour of the collection. He had left no contact information. It was no matter; Sarah was one of the few people in the world who had his private number. She hesitated before dialing. They had not spoken since Istanbul.

      “I was afraid you were never going to return my call.” The accent was a combination of Arabia and Oxford. The tone was calm, with a trace of exhaustion.

      “I was at lunch,” said Sarah evenly.

      “At an Italian restaurant on Park Avenue with a creature named Brady Boswell.”

      “How did you know?”

      “Two of my men were sitting a few tables away.”

      Sarah hadn’t noticed them. Obviously, her countersurveillance skills had deteriorated in the eight years since she had left the CIA.

      “Can you arrange it?” he asked.

      “What’s that?”

      “A private tour of the al-Bakari Collection, of course.”

      “Bad idea, Khalid.”

      “That’s the same thing my father said when I told him I wanted to give the women of my country the right to drive.”

      “The museum closes at five thirty.”

      “In that case,” he said, “you should expect me at six.”

       3

       NEW YORK

      IT WAS TRANQUILLITY, REPUTEDLY THE second-largest motor yacht in the world, that gave even his staunchest defenders in the West pause for thought. The future king saw it for the first time, or so the story went, from the terrace of his father’s holiday villa on Majorca. Captivated by

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