BUT SARAH was not waiting in the upstairs exhibition room. She was at that moment one floor below, in the office she shared with Julian, gazing out at the rather farcical scene taking place in the passageway. It was her first act of rebellion. Gabriel had wanted her to remain upstairs, hidden from view until the final moment, so that she could be unveiled along with Marguerite. She would obey his order eventually, but not until she saw Zizi once with her own eyes. She had studied his face in Yossi’s magazine clippings and had memorized the sound of his voice in the videos. But clippings and videos were no substitute for a glimpse of the real thing. And so she stood there, in blatant contravention of Gabriel’s instructions, and watched as Zizi and his entourage came filing through the passage into the darkened quadrangle.

Rafiq al-Kamal, chief of Zizi’s personal security detail, came first. He was bigger than he had appeared in the photographs, but moved with the agility of a man half his size. He had no overcoat, because an overcoat would interfere with his draw. He had no conscience either, Eli Lavon had told her. He made one quick survey of the yard, like a scout looking for signs of the enemy, then turned and with an old-fashioned hand signal beckoned the others forward.

Next came two very pretty girls with long black hair and long coats, looking peeved for having to walk the one hundred feet from the stranded cars to the gallery. The one on the right was Nadia al-Bakari, Zizi’s spoiled daughter. The one on the left was Rahimah Hamza, daughter of Daoud Hamza, the Stanford-educated Lebanese reputed to be the true financial genius behind AAB Holdings. Hamza himself was trailing a few paces behind the girls with a mobile phone pressed to his ear.

After Hamza came Herr Manfred Wehrli, the Swiss banker who handled Zizi’s money. Next to Wehrli was a child with no apparent owner, and behind the child two more beautiful women, one blond, the other with short hair the color of sandstone. When the child bolted suddenly across the yard in the wrong direction, he was snared in a pantherlike movement by Jean-Michel, the French kickboxer who now served as Zizi’s personal trainer and auxiliary bodyguard.

Abdul-Jalil and Abdul-Hakim, the American-trained lawyers, came next. Yossi had broken up one of the briefings by contemptuously pointing out that Zizi had chosen lawyers whose names meant Servant of the Great and Servant of the Wise One. After the lawyers came Mansur, chief of Zizi’s travel department, then Hassan, chief of communications, then Andrew Malone, Zizi’s soon-to-be-former exclusive art consultant. And finally, sandwiched between Wazir bin Talal and Jafar Sharuki, was Zizi himself.