Daniel Silva - The Confessor

"Casagrande? Carlo Casagrande? Is that what you're trying to tell me?"

"Cassszzzzzz.... zzzzzzz. ..."

Gabriel reached inside the dying man's jacket and gently patted around until he found a wallet. It was soaked with blood. As he dropped it into his pocket, he could hear the telephone ringing again. It had ended up somewhere in the backseat, by the sound of it. He peered through the opening where the rear window had once been and saw the phone, power light aglow, lying on the ground beneath the trunk. He stretched out his hand and took hold of it. Then he pressed the send button and brought it to his ear.

"Pronto."

"What's going on up there? Where is he?"

"He's right here," Gabriel said calmly in Italian. "In fact, he's speaking with you right now."

Silence.

"I know what happened in that convent," Gabriel said. "I know about Crux Vera. I know that you killed my friend. Now, I'm coming for you."

"Where's my man?"

"He's not doing so well at the moment. Would you like a word with him?"

Gabriel placed the telephone on the ground a few inches from the dying man's mouth. As he stood up, he could see the lights of the Peugeot bouncing toward him along the track. Chiara braked to a halt a few yards from where he was standing. Walking back to the car, Gabriel could hear only one sound.

"Casszzzz... Cassszzzzz... Zzzzzzzz...."

Gabriel searched the dead man's wallet by the jade-colored glow of the dashboard lights. He found no driver's license and no formal identification of any kind. Finally, he discovered a business card, folded in half and tucked behind a photograph of a girl in a sleeveless dress. It was so old he had to switch on the overhead light in order to make out the faded name: paulo olivero, ufficio sicurezza di vaticano. He held it aloft for Chiara to see. She glanced at it, then returned her eyes to the road.

"What does it say?"

"That there's a high probability the man I just killed was a Vatican cop."

"Great."

Gabriel memorized the telephone number on the card, then

tore it to shreds and flicked it out the window. They came to the autoroute. When Chiara slowed for guidance, Gabriel directed her west, toward Aix-en-Provence. She lit a cigarette with the dashboard lighter. Her hand was shaking.

"Would you like to tell me where we're going next?"

"Out of Provence as quickly as possible," he said. "After that, I haven't decided."

"Am I allowed to offer an opinion?"

"I don't see why not."

"It's time to go home. You know what happened at the convent, and you know who killed Benjamin. There's nothing else you can do but dig yourself deeper into a hole."

"There's more," Gabriel said. "There has to be more."

"What are you talking about?"

He stared absently out his window. The landscape was stark and windswept, red dust in the air. He saw none of it. Instead, he saw Sister Vincenza, sitting on the very spot where Martin Luther and Bishop Lorenzi had sealed their contract of murder, telling him that Benjamin had come to the Convent of the Sacred Heart to hear about the Jews that had taken refuge there. He saw Alessio Rossi, stinking of fear, fingernails gnawed to the quick, telling him how Carlo Casagrande had forced him to abort his investigation of missing priests. He saw Sister Regina Carcassi, listening to Luther and Lorenzi calmly discuss why Pope Pius XII should remain silent in the face of genocide, while a child slept with his head in her lap, a rosary wrapped around his hand.

And finally he saw Benjamin, a boy of twenty, myopic and round-shouldered, brilliant and destined for academic greatness. He had wanted to be a part of the Wrath of God team as badly as Gabriel had wanted to be released from it. Indeed, Benjamin had wanted to be an aleph, an assassin, but his methodical brain did not leave him with the skills necessary to point a Beretta at a man's face in a darkened alley and pull the trigger. It did give him all the tools necessary to be a brilliant support agent, and never once did he make an error--even at the end, when Black September and the European security services were breathing down their necks. This was the Benjamin Gabriel saw now, the Benjamin who would never stake his reputation on the word of a single source or document, no matter how compelling.

"Benjamin wouldn't have written a book implicating the Catholic Church in the Holocaust based only on Sister Regina's letter. He must have had something else."

Chiara swung to the side of the autoroute and applied the brakes. So?

"I worked with Benjamin in the field. I know how he thought, how his mind worked. He was careful to a fault. He had backup plans for his backup plans. Benjamin knew the book would be explosive. That's why he kept the contents so secret. He would have hidden copies of his important material in places his enemies wouldn't think to look." Gabriel hesitated, then added: "But places his friends would think to look."

Chiara stuffed her cigarette into the ashtray. "When I was at the Academy, we were taught how to walk into a room and find a hundred places to conceal something. Documents, weapons, anything at all."

"Benjamin and I did the course together."

"So where are we going?"

Gabriel lifted his hand and pointed straight ahead.

THEY DROVE in shifts, roughly two hours on, two hours off. Chiara managed to sleep during her rest periods, but Gabriel lay awake, the seat reclined, hands behind his head, staring up through the tinted glass of the moon roof. He passed the hours by mentally searching Benjamin's apartment for a second time. He opened books and desk drawers, closets and file cabinets. He planned expeditions into uncharted regions.

Dawn arrived, gray and forbidding, now a siege of torrential rain, now an avalanche of biting Rhone Valley wind. It never seemed to get properly light, and the headlights of the Peugeot stayed on all morning. At the German border, Gabriel felt a sudden fever when the guard seemed to take an extra moment scrutinizing the false Canadian passport that Pazner had given him in Rome.

They sped across a plain of sodden Swabian farmland, keeping pace with the high-speed traffic on the autobahn. In a town called Memmingen, Gabriel stopped for gas. Not far away was a shopping center with a small department store. He sent Chiara inside with a list. He fared better than he had in Cannes: two pairs of gray trousers, two button-down shirts, a black pullover sweater, a pair of black crepe-soled shoes, a quilted nylon raincoat. A second bag contained two flashlights and a pack of batteries, along with screwdrivers, pliers, and wrenches.

Gabriel changed in the car while Chiara drove the final miles to Munich. It was mid-afternoon by the time they arrived. The sky was low and dark, and it was raining steadily. Operational weather, Shamron would have called it. A gift from the intelligence gods. Gabriel's head was throbbing with exhaustion, and his eyes felt as though there was sand beneath the lids. He tried to remember the last time he'd had a proper night's sleep. He looked at Chiara and saw that she was hanging on to the steering wheel as though it were the only thing keeping her upright. A hotel was out of the question. Chiara had an idea.

JUST BEYOND the old city center, near the Reichenbachplatz, stands a rather drab, flat-fronted stucco building. Above the glass double doors is a sign. Judisches Einkaufszentrum von Munchen: Jewish Community Center of Munich. Chiara parked outside the front entrance and hurried inside. She returned five minutes later, drove around the corner, and parked opposite a side entrance. A girl was holding open the door. She was Chiara's age, heavy-hipped, with hair the color of a raven's wing. "How did you manage this?" Gabriel asked. "They called my father in Venice. He vouched for us." The interior of the center was modern and lit by harsh fluorescent light. They followed the girl up a staircase to the top floor, where they were shown into a small room with a bare linoleum floor and a pair of matching twin beds made up with beige spreads. To Gabriel, it seemed rather like a sick ward.