Daniel Silva - The English Assassin

“What do you mean by that?”

“When you’re dealing with Switzerland, Mr. Allon, it’s best to keep one thing in mind. Switzerland is not a real country. It’s a business, and it’s run like a business. It’s a business that is constantly in a defensive posture. It’s been that way for seven hundred years.”

“What does that have to do with Rolfe’s murder?”

“There are people in Switzerland who stand to lose a great deal if the sins of the past are exposed and the sewers of the Bahnhofstrasse are given the thorough flushing they so desperately need. These people are an invisible government, and are not to be taken lightly, which is why I live here instead of Lausanne. If you choose to pursue this matter, I suggest you watch your back.”

Ten minutes later Gabriel was walking down the stairs with his copy of The Myth tucked beneath his arm. He paused in the foyer for a moment to open the cover and read the words the professor had scrawled on the title page.

Beware the gnomes of Zurich -Emil Jacobi.

THAT image of Gabriel was captured by the man with a long-range digital camera standing in the window of the apartment house on the opposite side of the street. One hour earlier he had also snapped a photograph of Gabriel’s arrival. The pictures were not necessary, just a professional touch. Allon’s entire conversation with Emil Jacobi had been picked up by the pair of sensitive transmitters the man had planted in the professor’s apartment six months earlier. As Allon walked away, the surveillance artist fired off several more photographs. Then he sat down in front of his playback deck and listened to the tapes. After thirty minutes of steady work, he had completed a thorough transcript of the encounter. He spent ten more minutes checking the transcription for accuracy, then he encrypted the report and sent it via secure e-mail to Zurich, along with the photographs of Allon.

Thirty seconds after that, the information appeared on the computer screen of Gerhardt Peterson, who immediately picked up his telephone to request an urgent meeting with Herr Gessler. Gerhardt Peterson did not like Emil Jacobi, and neither did Herr Gessler. Jacobi’s one-man crusade against the financial oligarchy of Switzerland had become tiresome and costly. Both men agreed that it was time to deal with the meddlesome little professor.

The following morning, before leaving his flat for the office, Gerhardt Peterson made a telephone call from the privacy of his study. It lasted no more than two minutes. The fate of Emil Jacobi, the guilty conscience of Switzerland, had been sealed by a financial transaction, the transfer of two hundred thousand dollars into a numbered account in Geneva controlled by Anton Orsati. Gerhardt Peterson found that very fitting indeed.

WHEN GABRIEL ARRIVED at Anna Rolfe’s villa the following morning, he was pleased to see it being guarded by at least four men: one at the gate, a second at the base of the vineyards, a third on the tree line, and a fourth perched on the hilltop. Shamron had sent Rami, his taciturn personal bodyguard, to supervise the detail. He greeted Gabriel in the drive. When Gabriel asked how Anna was dealing with the team, Rami rolled his eyes- You’ll see soon enough.

He entered the villa and followed the sound of Anna’s violin up the staircase. Then he knocked on the door of her practice room and entered without waiting for permission. She spun round and berated him for interrupting her, then screamed at him for turning her home into an armed camp. As her tirade intensified, Gabriel looked down and fingered his bandages. A trickle of fresh blood had seeped through. Anna noticed this too. Immediately she fell silent and gently led him to her bedroom to change his dressings. He couldn’t help but look at her while she attended to him. The skin at the base of her neck was damp; the violin strings had left tiny valleys in the fingertips of her left hand. She was more beautiful then he remembered.

“Nice job,” he said, inspecting her work.

“I know something about bandaging hands, Mr. Allon. You have some things to tell me about my father, yes?”

“More questions than answers at this point. And please call me Gabriel.”

She smiled. “I have an idea, Gabriel. ”

INa nylon rucksack, Anna packed a picnic lunch of bread and cheese and cold chicken. Last she added a chilled bottle of wine, which she wrapped in a woolen blanket before placing it in the bag. Rami gave Gabriel a Beretta and a pair of boyish-looking bodyguards. On the shaded footpaths of the pine grove, with Rami’s chaperons in close attendance, Gabriel told Anna about Paris. He did not tell her about his conversations with Julian Isherwood and Emil Jacobi. That could wait.

The trees broke and the ruins appeared, perched on the face of a steep hillside. A wild goat hopped onto a granite boulder, bleated at them, then melted into the gorse. Gabriel shouldered the rucksack and followed Anna up the path.

He watched the muscles of her legs flexing with each stride, and thought of Leah. A hike on an autumn day like this, twenty-five years earlier-only then the hillside had been in the Golan and the ruins were Crusader. Leah had painted; Gabriel had just returned from Europe, and his desire to create had been chased away by the ghosts of the men he had killed. He had left Leah at her easel and climbed to the top of the hill. Above him had stood the military fortifications along the Syrian border; below stretched the Upper Galilee and the rolling hills of southern Lebanon. Lost in thought, he had not heard Leah’s approach. “They’re still going to come, Gabriel. You can sit there for the rest of your life looking at them, but they’re still going to come.” And without looking at her Gabriel had said: “If I used to live there, in the Upper Galilee, and now I lived up there, in a camp in Lebanon, I’d come too.”

The snap of Anna unfurling the picnic blanket shattered Gabriel’s memory. She spread the blanket over a patch of sunlit grass, as Leah had done that day, while Gabriel ritually uncorked the wine. Rami’s watchers took up their positions: one atop the ruins, one on the footpath below. As Anna pulled meat from the bones of the chicken, Gabriel showed her the photo of the man who had left the attaché-bomb at the gallery.

“Ever seen him before?”

She shook her head.

Gabriel put away the photo. “I need to know more about your father.”

“Like what?”

“Anything that can help me find out who killed him and took his collection.”

“My father was a Swiss banker, Gabriel. I know him as a man, but I know next to nothing about his work.”

“So tell me about him.”

“Where shall I start?”

“How about his age. You’re thirty-eight?”

“Thirty- seven. ”

“Your father was eighty-nine. That’s a rather large age difference.”

“That’s easy to explain. He was married to someone before my mother. She died of tuberculosis during the war. He and my mother met ten years later. She was quite a gifted pianist. She could have played professionally, but my father wouldn’t hear of it. Musicians were one step above exhibitionists, in his opinion. Sometimes I wonder what brought them together in the first place.”

“Were there children from the first marriage?”

Anna shook her head.

“And your mother’s suicide?”

“I was the one who found her body.” She hesitated for a moment, then said: “One never forgets something like that. Afterward, my father told us she’d had a history of depression. I loved my mother dearly, Gabriel. We were extremely close. My mother did not suffer from depression. She wasn’t taking any medication, she wasn’t under the care of a psychiatrist. She was moody, she was temperamental, but she was not the kind of woman who commits suicide for no reason. Something or someone made her take her own life. Only my father knew what it was, and he kept it secret from us.”