The Collector

The twenty-third novel in Daniel Silva's Gabriel Allon series unfolds during the autumn of 2022, against the backdrop of Russia's war in Ukraine. Gabriel Allon, the retired director-general of Israel's secret intelligence service (known simply as "the Office"), lives in Venice with his wife, Chiara Zolli, and their twin children, Irene and Raphael. He works as an art restorer at the Tiepolo Restoration Company, which Chiara manages.

The story opens on the Amalfi Coast, where Sofia Ravello, a young housekeeper at the estate of Lukas van Damme, a wealthy South African shipping executive, discovers her employer murdered. Van Damme had entertained a dark-haired woman the previous evening. The Carabinieri, Italy's national police force, find no forensic trace of her.

General Cesare Ferrari, the one-eyed commander of the Carabinieri's Art Squad, enlists Gabriel to authenticate a painting found at Van Damme's villa. In a hidden vault, Gabriel confirms it is Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear by Vincent van Gogh. He also notices an empty stretcher and scattered canvas tacks, evidence that a second, even more valuable painting was removed. Ferrari reveals that Van Damme's shipping company had ties to the 'Ndrangheta, the Calabrian crime syndicate. Gabriel theorizes that the mystery woman stole the painting from the vault, while a separate killer entered afterward to murder Van Damme.

In Paris, Gabriel meets Maurice Durand, a legendary art thief turned broker who identifies the missing work as The Concert by Johannes Vermeer, one of thirteen masterpieces taken during the 1990 robbery of Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Only thirty-four Vermeer paintings are known to survive, making The Concert the most valuable missing painting in the world. Durand's inquiries lead Gabriel to a diamond broker in Antwerp, and after a violent confrontation, Gabriel extracts the thief's location: a remote coastal settlement in northern Denmark.

The thief is Ingrid Johansen, a brilliant computer hacker who steals from the wealthy and donates most of the proceeds to charity. Ingrid was hired to steal the Vermeer by Peter Nielsen, a crooked Copenhagen book dealer, for ten million euros. She hacked Van Damme's security system, removed the canvas from its stretcher, and left the Van Gogh behind per her instructions. She drugged Van Damme's wine with ketamine and is certain he was alive when she departed. Ingrid delivered the Vermeer to Peter at a café on the island of Funen, but hours later, a man she had noticed watching their exchange shot Peter dead and stole the painting. Ingrid downloaded surveillance footage of the killer, but facial recognition searches produced no matches.

Gabriel rents a cottage near Ingrid's home and leaves cash and jewelry as bait. Ingrid identifies him through facial recognition, breaks into his cottage, and leaves a dinner invitation. Over the meal, they form an alliance: She shares the surveillance footage and Peter's phone; Gabriel offers her complete immunity. As they prepare to leave Denmark, a motorcyclist attacks. Gabriel kills the man, who bears a Z tattoo, a symbol of support for Russia's war in Ukraine. Before dying, the attacker refers to someone called "the collector."

Gabriel contacts Lars Mortensen, director of the PET, Denmark's security and intelligence service, and flies to Israel. At a secret detention facility, he interrogates Sergei Morosov, a former SVR (Russian foreign intelligence) officer he once captured. Morosov reveals that "the Collector" is the code name for Magnus Larsen, chief executive of DanskOil, Denmark's largest energy company. The Russians recruited Larsen through kompromat (compromising material): a recording of a sexual encounter at a Moscow hotel in 2003. When a young Danish woman involved with Larsen tried to blackmail him, the SVR killed her on orders from the Russian president.

Gabriel visits his first wife, Leah, who lives in a psychiatric hospital after sustaining catastrophic injuries from a terrorist car bomb in Vienna that also killed their young son Daniel. While Gabriel is away, Ingrid identifies the missing woman as Rikke Strøm, a young half-Inuit woman who vanished in 2013. Gabriel returns to the Office, where his mentor Ari Shamron reveals that Van Damme was a former South African nuclear physicist and longtime Office asset. Shamron discloses that South Africa's nuclear weapons program, into which the Office had unique visibility, likely produced more fissile material than officially declared. Gabriel connects the pieces: Larsen traveled to South Africa at the SVR's direction to purchase this unaccounted-for weapons-grade uranium for one billion dollars. The Vermeer theft was the South African seller's demanded payment.

Gabriel assembles his team at a safe house in Berlin and lures Larsen there using Ingrid, who poses as a consultant and charms him at a rare bookshop. At the safe house, Larsen is confronted by Gabriel and by Katje Strøm, the identical twin sister of the murdered Rikke, whom Ingrid had located. Shaken, Larsen confesses his twenty years as a Russian asset, the SVR-ordered killing of Rikke, the uranium purchase, and his commissioning of the Vermeer theft as payment demanded by the South African intermediary.

Gabriel flies to Washington and briefs Adrian Carter, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), who reveals the existence of Komarovsky, the Agency's most important Russian asset. Komarovsky has warned of Security Council directive 37-23\VZ, Russia's secret plan (code-named Aurora) to stage a false-flag nuclear detonation in a Russian border village using the South African uranium as a pretext for tactical nuclear strikes against Ukraine. The sole copy of the directive is in a safe in the home office of Nikolai Petrov, secretary of Russia's Security Council and an ultranationalist hardliner. Carter asks Gabriel to use Larsen and Ingrid to photograph the directive inside Petrov's home in Rublyovka, the billionaire suburb west of Moscow.

After intensive training, Ingrid and Magnus travel to Russia. Their cover positions Magnus as negotiating the dissolution of DanskOil's joint venture with RuzNeft, a Russian energy company, while Ingrid serves as his personal assistant under the alias Astrid Sørensen. At a dinner party in Rublyovka, Ingrid encounters Petrov. Later, at a lunch at Café Pushkin, TverBank chairman Gennady Luzhkov reveals himself to Magnus as Komarovsky by passing him a miniature copy of Doctor Zhivago. Dying of cancer, Luzhkov arranges access to Petrov's mansion under the guise of helping Petrov move his fortune offshore.

Inside Petrov's home, Ingrid finds the directive not in the safe but in Petrov's attaché case, brought from a meeting with the Russian president that evening. She removes the entire document. As Magnus drives north, Ingrid photographs every page using her Genesis, a covert Israeli satellite communications device, and transmits the images to Gabriel.

The directive confirms Aurora: Russia plans to detonate a crude nuclear weapon in the border village of Maksimov. Ukrainian missiles, guided with American assistance, destroy the weapon in transit. When Petrov discovers the theft, Gennady transfers Petrov's fortune to Dubai as leverage and negotiates safe passage for Magnus and Ingrid. Petrov betrays the deal. At the Torfyanovka border crossing, Russian soldiers surround the Range Rover and open fire. Magnus is shot; Ingrid returns fire. Gabriel, his colleague Mikhail Abramov, and a Finnish border guard cross into Russian territory, kill the soldiers, and drag the wounded pair into Finland.

In Moscow, Gennady confronts Petrov at Novodevichy Cemetery. Both men are killed in the ensuing gunfire; the Kremlin blames Ukrainian operatives.

Magnus survives and returns to Denmark as a hero, recast in the press as a longtime Danish intelligence asset. The PET presents evidence from the directive and Rikke's murder to the SVR, creating a mutual deterrent. General Ferrari announces the recovery of the Van Gogh and asks Gabriel to restore it. Gabriel returns to Venice, completes the restoration, and resumes life with his family. The Concert remains missing, likely in the hands of the South African seller. The novel closes with Gabriel attending a climate protest in Piazza San Marco with his daughter, followed by a family lunch, where he affirms his happiness despite the grief he still carries.