Daniel Silva - The English Assassin

THE COURIER WAS WAITING for Gabriel at the gate in Munich. He had hair the color of caramel and carried a sign that said MR.KRAMER -HELLER ENTERPRISES. Gabriel followed him through the terminal and across the carpark through blowing snow until they came to a dark-blue Mercedes sedan.

“There’s a Beretta in the glove box and some brisket on the backseat.”

“You bodlim think of everything.”

“We live to serve.” He handed Gabriel the keys. “Bon voyage.”

Gabriel climbed behind the wheel and started the engine. Ten minutes later he was speeding along the E54 motorway back to Zurich.

THE Swiss are an insular and tribal people, possessing an almost animal instinct to spot outsiders. Anything out of the ordinary is reported to the police, no matter how insignificant. Indeed, the Swiss citizenry is so vigilant that foreign intelligence agencies operating inside the country regard them as a second security service. With this fact in mind, Gabriel was careful to project an image of familiarity as he walked from his car to Augustus Rolfe’s villa.

He thought of an Office operation a few years earlier. A team of agents had been sent to Switzerland to bug the flat of a suspected Arab terrorist living in a small town outside Bern. An old lady spotted the team outside the Arab’s apartment house and telephoned the police to report a group of suspicious men in her neighborhood. A few minutes later the team was in custody, and the fiasco was reported around the world.

He climbed the slope of the Rosenbühlweg. The familiar silhouette of the Rolfe villa, with its turrets and its towering portico, rose above him. A car passed, leaving two ribbons of black in the fresh snow.

He punched in the code to the keyless entry system. The buzzer howled, the dead bolt snapped back. He pushed open the gate and climbed the steps. Two minutes later he was inside Rolfe’s villa, padding across the dark entrance hall, a small flashlight in one hand, a Beretta in the other.

ON the second-floor corridor, the darkness was absolute. Gabriel moved forward through the pencil-width beam of his flashlight. The study would be on his left, Anna had said-overlooking the street, first door past the bust. Gabriel turned the knob. Locked. But of course. He removed a pair of small metal tools from his coat pocket. God, how long had it been? The Academy, a hundred years earlier. He had been a green recruit, and Shamron had stood over him the entire time, shouting abuse in his ear. “You have fifteen seconds. Your teammates are dead unless you get that door open, Gabriel!”

He got down on one knee, slipped the tools into the lock, and went to work, flashlight between his teeth. A moment later, under Gabriel’s diligent assault, the old lock gave up the fight. He got to his feet, stepped inside, and closed the door behind him.

The room smelled of woodsmoke and dog and faintly of tobacco. He lifted the flashlight and played it about the interior. Its tiny pool of light meant that he experienced the room a few square feet at a time. A sitting area furnished with eighteenth-century armchairs. A Flemish Renaissance oak writing table. Bookshelves stretching from a burnished wood floor to a molded ceiling.

Augustus Rolfe’s desk.

Strange, but it didn’t seem like the desk of a powerful man. There was an air of donnish clutter: a stack of files, a faded leather blotter, a teacup filled with paper clips, a pile of antique books. Gabriel lifted the first cover with his index finger and was greeted by the scent of ancient paper and dust. He turned the light toward the first page. Goethe.

As he closed the volume, the light fell upon a large ashtray of cut glass. A dozen cigarette butts lay haphazardly, like spent cartridges, in a bed of ash. He examined the butts more carefully. Two different brands. Most were Benson amp; Hedges, but three were Silk Cuts. The old man probably had smoked the Benson amp; Hedges, but who had smoked the Silk Cuts? Anna? No, Anna always smoked Gitanes.

He turned his attention back to the provenance. Anna had said Rolfe kept them in the bottom right-hand desk drawer in a file labeled PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE. The drawer, like the entrance to Rolfe’s study, was locked. This time he had a key. He pulled it open and began leafing through the personal papers of Augustus Rolfe.

He came across a file labeled MAXIMILIAN. He took it between his thumb and forefinger, then hesitated. Did he have any right? It felt too much like voyeurism. Like peering through a lighted window during an evening walk through a city and seeing a couple quarreling. Or an old man sitting alone in front of a television. But what might the file reveal? What sort of things had this man saved about his son? What might Gabriel learn from it about this man Augustus Rolfe?

He pulled out the file, laid it across the open drawer, lifted the cover. Photographs, magazine clippings from the sporting pages of European newspapers, tributes from teammates, a long piece from the Zurich newspaper on the cycling accident in the Alps- “He was a good man, and I was proud to call him my son,” Augustus Rolfe, a prominent Zurich banker, said in a statement issued by his lawyer. “I will miss him more than any words could ever express.” Crisply folded, meticulously dated and labeled. Augustus Rolfe may have disagreed with his son’s chosen profession, Gabriel concluded, but he was a proud father.

Gabriel closed the file, slipped it back in its proper place, and resumed the search for PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE. Another file caught his eye: ANNA. Again he hesitated, then drew out the file. Inside were childhood photographs of Anna playing the violin, invitations to recitals and concerts, newspaper clippings, reviews of her performances and recordings. He looked more carefully at the photographs. There were definitely two Annas-before the suicide of her mother, and after. The difference in her appearance was striking.

Gabriel closed the file and slipped it back into the drawer. Time to get back to the business at hand. He flipped through the files until he came to the one marked PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE. He removed it, placed it on Rolfe’s desk, and lifted the cover. Letters, some handwritten, some typed on professional stationery. German, French, Italian, English-the linguistic patchwork quilt that is Switzerland. Gabriel leafed through them quickly until he came to the end of the stack. Then he went back to the beginning and repeated the process more slowly. The result was the same.

The provenance were gone.

AS Gabriel played his flashlight beam about the study, he thought of a training drill he had undergone at the Academy. An instructor had led him into a room decorated like a hotel suite, handed him a document, and given him a minute to find five suitable hiding places. Had he been given the test in Rolfe’s study instead of an ersatz hotel room, he could have come up with a hundred places to hide a document. A false floorboard, a large book, beneath a carpet or floorboard, inside a piece of furniture, locked away in a concealed wall safe. And that was only in the study. There were thousands of places in the rambling villa for Rolfe to conceal a sheaf of documents. This was a man who had built an underground bunker for his secret art collection. If Rolfe wanted to hide something, the odds of Gabriel finding it were slim.

The thought of leaving Zurich empty-handed after so difficult and treacherous a journey was galling to Gabriel. There were two possible explanations for the missing documents. Number one: They had been removed, by Rolfe or someone like Werner Müller. Number two: Rolfe had somehow misplaced them. Surely it was possible. He was an old man. Old men make mistakes. Memories fade. File labels become harder to read.