Daniel Silva - The English Assassin

VENICE is a city where the usual rules of street surveillance and countersurveillance do not apply. It is a virtuoso piece requiring a virtuoso’s sure hand. There are no motorcars, no buses or streetcars. There are few places to establish a worthwhile fixed post. There are streets that lead to nowhere-into a canal or an enclosed courtyard with no means of escape. It is a city where the man being pursued holds all the advantages.

They were very good, Team Giorgione. They had been trained by the surveillance artists of the Office, and they had honed their skills on the streets of Europe and the Middle East. They communicated silently, drifting in and out of Gabriel’s orbit, appearing and reappearing from different directions. Only Jonathan remained constantly in the same position, five paces from Gabriel’s back, like a satellite in stationary orbit.

They moved north through a series of church squares, until finally they settled in a small café on the edge of the broad Campo Santa Maria della Formosa. Gabriel and Anna took a table, while Jonathan remained standing at the bar with a group of men. Through the windows, Gabriel caught momentary glimpses of the team: Shimon and Ilana buying gelato from a vendor at the center of the square. Yitzhak and Moshe admiring the plain exterior of the church of the Santa Maria Formosa. And Deborah, in a flash of her old spirit, playing football with a group of Italian schoolboys.

This time it was Jonathan who checked in with the team members by secure cell phone. When he was finished, he turned toward Gabriel and mouthed two words: She’s clean.

LATE that evening, when Team Giorgione had finished its debriefing and its members had decamped back to their hotel rooms, Gabriel lingered in the half-light of the sitting room, staring at the photographs of Christopher Keller. Upstairs, in the bedroom, Anna’s violin fell silent. Gabriel listened as she placed it back in its case and snapped the latches. A moment later, she descended the staircase. Gabriel gathered up the photographs and slipped them into a file folder. Anna sat down and lit a cigarette.

Gabriel said, “Are you going to try it?”

“ ‘The Devil’s Trill’?”

“Yes.”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“What will you do if you think you can’t pull it off?”

“I’ll substitute a series of unaccompanied sonatas by Bach. They’re quite beautiful, but they’re not the ‘Trill.’ The critics will wonder why I chose not to play it. They’ll speculate that I returned too quickly. It will be great fun.”

“Whatever you decide to play, it’s going to be marvelous.”

Her gaze fell upon the manila folder on the coffee table.

“Why did you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Why did you hide the photographs of him when I came into the room? Why don’t you want me to see him?”

“You worry about ‘The Devil’s Trill,’ and I’ll worry about the man with the gun.”

“Tell me about him.”

“There are some things you don’t need to know.”

“He may very well try to kill me tomorrow night. I have a right to know something about him.”

Gabriel could not argue with this, and so he told her everything he knew.

“Is he really out there?”

“We have to assume he is.”

“Rather interesting, don’t you think?”

“What’s that?”

“He can change his voice and appearance at will and he vanished amid fire and blood in the desert of Iraq. He sounds like the Devil to me.”

“He is a devil.”

“So, I’ll play his sonata for him. Then you can send him back to Hell.”

LATE THE FOLLOWING afternoon, the Englishman drifted along Calle della Passion, the soaring Gothic campanile of the Frari church rising ahead of him. He sliced through a knot of tourists, adroitly shifting the position of his head to avoid their umbrellas, which bobbed like jellyfish adrift on the tide. In the square was a café. He ordered coffee and spread his guidebooks and maps over the little table. If anyone was watching, they would assume he was just another tourist, which was fine with the Englishman.

He had been working since early that morning. Shortly after breakfast, he had set out from his hotel in Santa Croce, maps and guidebooks in hand, and spent several hours wandering San Marco and San Polo, memorizing their streets and bridges and squares-the way he’d done before, in another lifetime, in West Belfast. He’d paid particular attention to the streets and canals around the Frari church and the Scuola Grande di San Rocco-had played a game with himself, wandering in circles in San Polo until, quite intentionally, he would find himself lost. Then he would navigate his way back to the Frari church, testing himself on the street names as he went. Inside the scuola, he spent a few minutes in the ground-floor hall, pretending to gaze upon the massive Tintorettos, but in reality he was more interested in the relationship of the main entrance to the staircase. Then he went upstairs and stood in the upper hall, locating the approximate position on the floor where he expected to find himself seated during the recital. Rossetti had been right; even from the back of the room, it would be no problem for a professional to kill the violinist with the Tanfolglio.

He looked at his watch: a few minutes after five o’clock. The recital was scheduled to begin at eight-thirty. He had one final piece of business to conduct before then. He paid his check and walked through the gathering darkness toward the Grand Canal. Along the way he stopped in a men’s shop and purchased a new jacket, a quilted black nylon coat with a corduroy collar. The style was quite fashionable in Venice that season; he had seen dozens of coats just like it during the day.

He crossed the Grand Canal by traghetto and made his way to Signore Rossetti’s store in San Marco. The little jeweler was standing behind his counter, preparing to close up shop for the night. Once again the Englishman followed him up the groaning staircase to his office.

“I need a boat.”

“That will be no problem. When would you like it?”

“Right away.”

The jeweler stroked the side of his cheek. “There’s a young man I know. His name is Angelo. He owns a water taxi. Very careful, very dependable.”

“He’s not the kind to ask uncomfortable questions?”

“Not at all. He’s performed jobs like this before.”

“Can you reach him on short notice?”

“I think so, yes. What sort of arrangement do you require?”

“I’d like him to be waiting on the Rio di San Polo, near the Museo Goldoni.”

“I see. That should not be a problem, though there will be an extra charge for night service. It’s customary in Venice. One moment, please. Let me see if I can reach him.”

Rossetti found the man’s name in his telephone book and dialed his number. After a brief conversation, the deal was done. Angelo would be at the Museo Goldoni in fifteen minutes and he would wait there.

“Perhaps it would be easier if you paid me,” Rossetti said. “I’ll look after the boy’s interests.”

Once again the transaction was carried out in dollars after Rossetti worked out the sum on his pad of scratch paper. The Englishman saw himself out and walked to a restaurant on the Calle della Verona, where he dined simply on vegetable soup and fettuccine with cream and mushrooms. It was not the happy din of the little restaurant that filled his ears during the meal, but the memory of the conversation he had heard on the tape he had taken from Emil Jacobi-the conversation between the Swiss professor and Gabriel Allon about the sins of a man named Augustus Rolfe. The father of the woman he had been hired to kill.