Daniel Silva - The Kill Artist

Gabriel shook his head and busied himself with the tea-milk on the bottom, tea on top, English style. Shamron dumped three packets of sugar into his cup, stirred violently, and pressed on with his inquiries. “No little loves? No loose women that you lure onto your boat for a pleasure cruise?”

“No women on the boat. Just Peel.”

“Ah, yes, Peel. Your watcher.”

“My watcher.”

“May I ask why not?”

“No, you may not.”

Shamron frowned. He was accustomed to unimpeded access into Gabriel’s personal life.

“What about this girl?” Shamron cocked his head in the direction of the waitress. “She can’t take her eyes off of you. She doesn’t interest you in any way?”

“She’s a child,” said Gabriel.

“You’re a child.”

“I’m closing in on fifty now.”

“You look forty.”

“That’s because I don’t work for you anymore.”

Shamron dabbed omelet from his lips. “Maybe you won’t take another woman because you’re afraid Tariq will try to kill her too.”

Gabriel looked up as if he had heard a gunshot.

“Maybe if you help me take down Tariq, you can forgive yourself for what happened in Vienna. I know you blame yourself, Gabriel. If it wasn’t for Tunis, Leah and Dani would never have been in Vienna.”

“Shut up-”

“Maybe if you help me take down Tariq, you can finally let go of Leah and get on with your life.”

Gabriel stood up, tossed a crumpled ten-pound note onto the table, and went out. Shamron smiled apologetically at the girl and followed softly after him.

At the base of the cliff, on the little gray-sand beach at Polpeor Cove, stood the ruins of a lifeguard station slip. A bright wet moon shone through the broken clouds, and the sea held the reflection of light. Gabriel thrust his hands into the pockets of his jacket, thinking of Vienna. The afternoon before the bombing. The last time he had made love to Leah. The last time he had made love to anyone… Leah had insisted on keeping the blinds of their bedroom window open, even though it overlooked the courtyard of the apartment house and Gabriel was convinced the neighbors were watching them. Leah hoped they were. She found perverse justice in the idea of Jews-even secret Jews living as an Italian art restorer and his Swiss girlfriend-seeking pleasure in a city where they had suffered so much persecution. Gabriel remembered the damp heat of Leah’s body, the taste of salt on her skin. Afterward they had slept. When he awakened he found her sitting on the edge of the bed, watching him. “I want this to be your last job. I can’t take this anymore. I want you to leave the Office and do something normal. We can stay in Europe and you can work only as a restorer. Promise me, Gabriel.”

Shamron joined him on the beach.

Gabriel looked up. “Why did you go back to the Office? Why couldn’t you stay in Tiberias and live life? Why did you go running back when they called?”

“Too much unfinished business. I’ve never known anyone who left the secret world with all his affairs in order. We all leave behind bits of loose thread. Old operations, old enemies. They pull at you, like memories of old lovers. I also couldn’t bear to watch the Alsatian and Lev destroying my service any longer.”

“Why did you keep Lev?”

“Because I was forced to keep Lev. Lev made it clear to the prime minister that he would not go quietly if I tried to push him out. The last thing the prime minister wanted was a paralyzed Operations division. He got weak knees and made Lev untouchable.”

“He’s a snake.”

“The prime minister?”

“Lev.”

“A venomous snake, however, who needs to be handled carefully. When the Alsatian resigned, Lev believed he was next in the line of succession. Lev is no longer a young man. He can feel the keys to the throne room slipping through his fingers. If I come and go quickly, Lev may still get his chance. If I serve out my full term, if I linger and take a long time to die, then perhaps the prime minister will choose a younger prince as my successor. Needless to say, I do not count Lev as one of my supporters at King Saul Boulevard.”

“He never liked me.”

“That’s because he was envious of you. Envious of your professional accomplishments. Envious of your talent. Envious of the fact you earned three times as much in your cover job as Lev earned on his Office salary. My God, he was even envious of Leah. You’re everything Lev wanted to see in himself, and he hated you for it.”

“He wanted to be part of the Black September team.”

“Lev is brilliant, but he was never field material. Lev is a headquarters man.”

“Does he know you’re here?”

“He knows nothing,” Shamron said coldly. “And if you decide to come back, he’ll know nothing about that either. I’ll handle you personally, just like the old days.”

“Killing Tariq isn’t going to bring back Dani. Or Leah. Haven’t you learned anything? While we were busy killing the members of Black September, we didn’t notice that the Egyptians and the Syrians were preparing to drive us into the sea. And they nearly succeeded. We killed thirteen members of Black September, and it didn’t bring back one of the boys they slaughtered in Munich.”

“Yes, but it felt good.”

Gabriel closed his eyes: an apartment block in Rome ’s Piazza Annabaliano, a darkened stairwell, a painfully thin Palestinian translator named Wadal Abdel Zwaiter. Black September’s chief of operations in Italy. He remembered the sound of a neighbor practicing piano-a rather tedious piece he didn’t recognize-and the sickening thud of the bullets tearing through tissue and cracking bone. One of Gabriel’s shots missed Zwaiter’s body and shattered a bottle of fig wine that he had purchased moments earlier. For some reason Gabriel always thought of the wine, dark, purple and brown, flowing over the stone floor, mingling with the blood of the dying man.

He opened his eyes, and Rome was gone. “It feels good for a while,” he said. “But then you start to think you’re as bad as the people you’re killing.”

“War always takes a toll on the soldiers.”

“When you look into a man’s eyes while pouring lead into his body, it feels more like murder than war.”

“It’s not murder, Gabriel. It was never murder.”

“What makes you think I can find Tariq?”

“Because I’ve found someone who works for him. Someone I believe will lead us to Tariq.”

“Where is he?”

“Here in England.”

“Where?”

“ London, which presents me with a problem. Under our agreements with British intelligence, we’re obligated to inform them when we are operating on their soil. I would prefer not to live up to that agreement, because the British will inform their friends at Langley, and Langley will pressure us to knock it off for the sake of the peace process.”

“You do have a problem.”

“Which is why I need you. I need someone who can run an operation in England without arousing suspicion among the natives. Someone who can run a simple surveillance operation without fucking it up.”

“I watch him, and he leads me to Tariq?”

“Sounds simple, doesn’t it?”

“It’s never that simple, Ari. Especially when you’re involved.”

Gabriel slipped into the cottage and tossed his jacket onto the cot in the sitting room. Immediately he felt the Vecellio pulling at him. It was always this way. He never left the house without first spending one more moment before his work, never returned home without going directly to his studio to gaze at the painting. It was the first thing he saw each afternoon when he awoke, the last thing he saw each morning before he went to sleep. It was something like obsession, but Gabriel believed only an obsessive could be a good restorer. Or a good assassin, for that matter.