Daniel Silva - The English Assassin

Gabriel jumped up and grabbed hold of the metal spikes at the top of the wall. The beam of light fell on him, and someone shouted in German. He pulled himself up, flailing his feet against the wall. A shot struck the stucco, then another. Gabriel could feel sutures tearing in his hands.

He threw his leg over the top and tried to drop onto the other side, but his coat had become tangled on a spike, and he dangled there helplessly, his head exposed, blinded by the flashlight. He twisted his body violently until the spike released him, and he fell into the opposing garden.

The envelope slipped through his coat and dropped into the snow. Gabriel scooped it up, shoved it back into his trousers, and started running.

A BURST of halogen lamplight turned the night electric white. Somewhere an alarm screamed. Gabriel ran along the side of the villa until he reached another wall, this one shielding the villa from the street. He scaled it quickly and dropped onto the other side.

He found himself in a narrow street. Lights were coming on in the neighboring villas-the Swiss and their legendary vigilance. As he ran down the street, Ari Shamron’s Eleventh Commandment played in his head: Thou shalt not get caught!

He came to Krähbühlstrasse, the wide boulevard where he had parked. He sprinted down the gentle curving slope of the street until he spotted his car. He skidded to a stop and came crashing to the pavement. Two men were peering into the interior with flashlights.

As he clambered to his feet, the men trained their flashlights on him. He turned in the opposite direction and headed back up the hill. Thou shalt do anything to avoid being arrested!

He drew the Glock he had taken from the man in the study and kept running. He was beginning to tire. The cold air was searing his lungs, and his mouth tasted of rust and blood. After a few steps, he saw headlights coming down the hill: a big Audi sedan, wheels spinning on the new snow.

He glanced over his shoulder down the hill. The two men were chasing him on foot. No side streets, no alleys-he was trapped. Thou shalt shed innocent blood if necessary!

The Audi was speeding directly toward him. He stopped running and leveled the Glock in his outstretched hands. When the car fishtailed and slid to a halt a few feet away, he took aim at the silhouette behind the wheel. Before he could fire, the passenger door flew open.

“Get in, Gabriel!” Anna Rolfe shouted. “Hurry.”

SHE drove with the same intensity with which she played the violin-one hand on the steering wheel, the other gripping the stick shift. Down the Zürichberg, across Limmat, into the quiet streets of the city center. Gabriel took a long look over his shoulder.

“You can slow down now.”

She eased off the gas.

“Where did you learn to handle a car like that?”

“I was a Zurich girl with a lot of money. When I wasn’t practicing the violin, I was tearing around the Zürichsee in one of my father’s cars. I’d wrecked three by the time I was twenty-one.”

“Congratulations.”

“Bitterness doesn’t suit you, Gabriel. My cigarettes are in the console. Do me a favor and light one.”

Gabriel opened the console and took out the pack of Gitanes. He lit it with the dashboard lighter. The smoke caught at the back of his throat and he nearly choked.

Anna laughed at him. “Imagine, an Israeli who doesn’t smoke.”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“That’s all you have to say? If I hadn’t shown up, you’d have been arrested.”

“No, if you hadn’t shown up, I’d be dead. But I still want to know what the hell you’re doing here. Did Rami give you permission to leave the villa?”

“I suspect that by now he’s probably discovered that I’m not there.”

“How did you get away?”

“I went upstairs to my studio to practice. I rolled a tape on a particularly long piece. I suppose you can guess the rest.”

“How did you get off the grounds?”

“Carlos told Rami that he was going into the village to do some marketing. I was in the back beneath a blanket.”

“It’s safe to assume several dozen members of my service are now engaged in a frantic and pointless search for you. That was a very stupid thing to do. How did you get to Zurich?”

“I flew here, of course.”

“Directly from Lisbon?”

“Yes.”

“How long have you been here?”

“About two hours.”

“Did you go inside your father’s house?”

She shook her head. “When I arrived I saw two men waiting outside in a parked car. At first I thought they might be private security. Then I realized something was wrong.”

“What did you do?”

“I didn’t feel safe waiting in the car, so I drove around the neighborhood, hoping to find you before you tried to go in. I missed you, of course. Then I heard the alarms going off.”

“Did you tell anyone you were coming?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. Why?”

“Because it explains a lot of things. It means that the villa is under constant watch. It means that they know we came back here. It means they followed me to Rome. They’ve been following me ever since.”

“What happened inside my father’s house?”

WHEN Gabriel had finished, Anna said: “Did you get the provenance at least?”

“They were gone.”

“That’s not possible.”

“Someone must have gotten to them first.”

“Did you find anything else?”

I found a photograph of your father with Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, admiring the view from the Berghof at Berchtesgaden.

“No,” Gabriel said. “I didn’t find anything else.”

“Are you sure about that? You didn’t use the opportunity to rifle through any of my father’s personal papers?”

Gabriel ignored her. “Did your father smoke?”

“Why does that matter now?”

“Just answer the question, please. Did your father smoke?”

“Yes, my father smoked!”

“What kind of cigarettes?”

“Benson and Hedges.”

“Did he ever smoke Silk Cuts?”

“He was very set in his ways.”

“What about someone else in the household?”

“Not that I know of. Why do you ask?”

“Because someone was smoking Silk Cuts in your father’s study recently.”

They came to the lake. Anna pulled to the side of the street. “Where are we going?”

“ You’re going back to Portugal.”

“No, I’m not. We do this together, or not at all.” She dropped the Audi into gear. “Where are we going?”

SOME MEN MIGHT be squeamish about installing a voice-activated taping system in their home. Professor Emil Jacobi was not one of them. His life was his work, and he had little time for anything else; certainly nothing that might cause him any embarrassment if it was captured on audiotape.

He received a steady stream of visitors to his flat on the rue Lanterne: people with unpleasant memories of the past; stories they had heard about the war. Just last week, an old woman had told him about a train that had stopped outside her village in 1944. She and a group of friends were playing in the meadow next to the tracks when they heard moans and scratches coming from the cargo cars. When they moved closer, they saw that there were people on the train: miserable, wretched people, begging for food and water. The old woman realized now that the people were Jews-and that her country had allowed the Nazis to use its railways to ship human cargo to the death camps in the East.

If Jacobi had tried to document her story by taking handwritten notes, he would have failed to capture it all. If he had placed a tape recorder in front of her, she might have become self-conscious. It had been Jacobi’s experience that most elderly were nervous around tape recorders and video cameras. And so they had sat in the cluttered comfort of his flat like old friends, and the old woman had told her story without the distraction of a notebook or a visible tape recorder. Jacobi’s secret system had caught every word of it.