And with that, she headed upstairs and vanished once more behind the closed door of her lair. Gabriel drove to Frederikshavn and purchased two changes of warm clothing, a pair of waterproof hiking boots, and a consignment of painting supplies, including four pre-stretched canvases and a French plein air easel. He erected theeasel on the beach during a sudden burst of fair weather and, brush and palette in hand, raced to capture the extraordinary interplay between light and sea. The finished canvas was leaning against the wall in the sitting room when Ingrid, in the same clothing, her hair in disarray, wandered downstairs a few minutes after 7:00 p.m.
“Sign it,” she insisted.
Gabriel shook his head.
“You’re like Leonardo. He never signed his work either.”
“And he never would have made a painting as dreadful as that one.”
“He did produce the first landscape in the history of Western art, though. It was a sketch of the countryside near Florence.”
“Is that so?” asked Gabriel archly.
“I did a bit of research last night.”
“You were supposed to be hacking SBL PrivatBank of Lugano.”
“I did that too.”
“Am I allowed to ask how it’s going?”
“I’ve breached the outer perimeter. Now I’m just waiting for someone to grant me access to the inner ring.”
“Any candidates?”
“Don’t worry, Mr. Allon. It won’t be much longer.”
She made them a simple dinner of mushroom omelets and a green salad and then returned to work, leaving the dirty dishes in Gabriel’s hands. He listened to the four Brahms symphonies on Ingrid’s audio system and at midnight crawled into bed. There he endured the clatter of keyboards until 2:00 a.m., when the racket in the next room suddenly fell silent. The respite was brief, three hours at most, then it started up again. Gabriel, his head throbbing, went downstairs and made the coffee. Ingrid showed her flawless face shortly after eight.
“Not a word,” she muttered, and was gone.
Alone once more, Gabriel stared mystified at a Danish morning television program until ten o’clock. Then he pulled on his warms and his waterproof boots and made the fifteen-kilometer hike along the beach to Grenen, where the incoming waters of the North Sea collide with the outgoing current of the Baltic. He lunched at a coffeehouse near the Skagens Museum and was back in Kandestederne in time to make a painting of the sun setting over the gorse-covered dunes.
It was a few minutes after five when he returned to the cottage. On the low table in the sitting room he found a chilled bottle of Sancerre, two wineglasses, a portable hard drive, and a handwritten note. The hard drive contained the current balance sheet of SBL PrivatBank of Lugano, along with several hundred thousand pages of supporting documents. The note concerned their dinner plans. They had a reservation at the Brøndums Hotel at 8:00 p.m. The proprietor had agreed to accept two unsigned landscapes in lieu of payment.
27
Kandestederne
Swiss financial authorities, while forgiving of many sins, have always frowned upon corporate espionage, especially when directed against a member of the family. Martin Landesmann, therefore, thought it wise for him to travel from Geneva to Denmark to review the hacked material from SBL PrivatBank. His Gulfstream G550 landed at Aalborg International Airport shortly after eleven o’clock the following morning. Gabriel collected the environmentally mindful Swiss financier in Ingrid’s electric Volvo.
“I applaud your decision to go green,” he declared as the vehicle slid silently away from the terminal.
“Says the man who just stepped off one of his two private jets.”
“The Gulfstream is far more fuel-efficient than my Boeing Business Jet,” said Martin without a trace of irony.
“I suppose we all have to make sacrifices.”
“I couldn’t have said it better myself.”
“Feel free to use it at Davos.”
“I just might.”
Gabriel made his way to the E39 and headed north. Martin gazed at the tabletop-flat landscape beyond his window.
“Why Denmark?” he asked.
