THE QUEST FOR GABRIEL WAS NEARLY AS INTENSE as the search for the perpetrators of the massacre in Rome. He was a man who never telegraphed his movements and was no longer under Office discipline, so it surprised no one, least of all Shamron, that he’d left Venice without bothering to tell anyone where he was going. As it turned out, he’d gone to England to see his wife, Leah, who was living in a private psychiatric hospital in a secluded corner of Surrey. His first stop, however, was New Bond Street, where, at the behest of a London art dealer named Julian Isherwood, he’d agreed to attend an Old Master sale at Bonhams auction house.

Isherwood arrived first, clutching a battered attaché case in one hand and the throat of his Burberry raincoat with the other. A few other dealers were huddled in the lobby. Isherwood murmured an insincere greeting and loped off to the cloakroom. A moment later, relieved of his sodden Burberry, he took up watch near the window. Tall and precarious, he was clad in his customary auction attire, a gray chalk-stripe suit and his lucky crimson necktie. He arranged his windblown gray locks to cover his bald spot and briefly examined his own face reflected in the glass. Hungover, a stranger might have assumed, perhaps a bit drunk. Isherwood was neither. He was stone-cold sober. Sharp as his mother’s tongue. He flung out his arm, pushed his French cuff from his wrist, and shot a glance at his watch. Late. Not like Gabriel. Punctual as the Nine O’clock News. Never one to keep a client cooling his heels. Never one to fall behind on a restoration—unless, of course, it was due to circumstances beyond his control.

Isherwood straightened his necktie and lowered his narrow shoulders, so that the figure peering back at him had the easy grace and confidence that seemed the birthright of Englishmen of a certain class. He moved in their circles, disposed of their collections, and acquired new ones on their behalf, yet he would never truly be one of them. And how could he? His backbone-of-England surname and lanky English bearing concealed the fact that he was not, at least technically, English at all. English by nationality and passport, yes, but German by birth, French by upbringing, and Jewish by religion. Only a handful of trusted friends knew that Isherwood had staggered into London as a child refugee in 1942 after being carried across the snowbound Pyrenees by a pair of Basque shepherds. Or that his father, the renowned Berlin art dealer Samuel Isakowitz, had ended his days on the edge of a Polish forest, in a place called Sobibor.