Daniel Silva - The Kill Artist

He climbed the stairs to his studio, switched on the fluorescent lamp, gazed at the painting. God, how long had he been at it already? Six months? Seven? Vecellio had probably completed the altarpiece in a matter of weeks. It would take Gabriel ten times that long to repair it.

He thought of everything he had done so far. Two weeks studying Vecellio himself. Life, influences, techniques. A month analyzing The Adoration of the Shepherd with several pieces of high-tech equipment: the Wild microscope to view the surface, X-ray photography to peer below the surface, ultraviolet light to expose previous retouching. After the assessment, four months removing the dirty, yellowed varnish. It was not like stripping a coffee table; it was tedious, time-consuming work. Gabriel first had to create the perfect solvent, one that would dissolve the varnish but leave the paint intact. He would dip a homemade cotton swab into the solvent and then twirl it over the surface of the painting until it became soiled with dirty varnish. Then make another swab and start all over again. Dip… twirl… discard. Dip… twirl… discard. Like swabbing the deck of a battleship with a toothbrush. On a good day he could remove a few square inches of dirty varnish.

Now he had begun the final phase of the job: retouching those portions of the altarpiece damaged or destroyed over the centuries. It was mind-bending, meticulous work, requiring him to spend several hours each night with his face pressed against the painting, magnifying glasses over his eyes. His goal was to make the retouching invisible to the naked eye. The brush strokes, colors, and texture all had to match the original. If the surrounding paint was cracked, Gabriel painted false cracks into his retouching. If the artist had created a unique shade of lapis lazuli blue, Gabriel might spend several hours mixing pigment on his palette trying to duplicate it. His mission was to come and go without being seen. To leave the painting as he had found it, but restored to its original glory, cleansed of impurity.

He needed sleep, but he needed time with the Vecellio more. Shamron had wakened his emotions, sharpened his senses. He knew it would be good for his work. He switched on the stereo, waited for the music to begin, then slipped his Binomags on his head and picked up his palette as the first notes of La Bohème washed over him. He placed a small amount of Mowolith 20 on the palette, added a bit of dry pigment, thinned down the mixture with arcosolve until the consistency felt right. A portion of the Virgin’s cheek had flaked away. Gabriel had been struggling to repair the damage for more than a week. He touched his brush to the paint, lowered the magnifying visor on the Binomags, and gently tapped the tip of the brush against the surface of the painting, carefully imitating Vecellio’s brushstrokes. Soon he was completely lost in the work and the Puccini.

After two hours Gabriel had retouched an area about half the size of the button on his shirt. He lifted the visor on the Binomags and rubbed his eyes. He prepared more paint on his palette and started in again.

After another hour Shamron intruded on his thoughts.

It was Tariq who killed the ambassador and his wife in Paris.

If it wasn’t for the old man, Gabriel would never have become an art restorer. Shamron had wanted an airtight cover, something that would allow Gabriel to live and travel legitimately in Europe. Gabriel had been a gifted painter-he had studied art at a prestigious institute in Tel Aviv and had spent a year studying in Paris -so Shamron sent him to Venice to study restoration. When he had finished his apprenticeship, Shamron had recruited Julian Isherwood to find him work. If Shamron needed to send Gabriel to Geneva, Isherwood used his connections to find Gabriel a painting to restore. Most of the work was for private collections, but sometimes he did work for small museums and for other dealers. Gabriel was so talented he quickly became one of the most sought-after art restorers in the world.

At 2:00 A.M. the Virgin’s face blurred before Gabriel’s eyes. His neck felt as though it were on fire. He pushed back the visor, scraped the paint from his palette, put away his things. Then he went downstairs and fell into his bed, still clothed, and tried to sleep. It was no good. Shamron was back in his head.

It was Tariq who made the Seine run red with the blood of my people.

Gabriel opened his eyes. Slowly, bit by bit, layer by layer, it all came back, as though it were depicted in some obscene fresco painted on the ceiling of his cottage: the day Shamron recruited him, his training at the Academy, the Black September operation, Tunis, Vienna… He could almost hear the crazy Hebrew-based lexicon of the place: kidon, katsa, sayan, bodel, bat leveyha.

We all leave behind bits of loose thread. Old operations, old enemies. They pull at you, like memories of old lovers.

Damn you, Shamron, thought Gabriel. Find someone else.

At dawn he swung his feet to the floor, climbed out of bed, and stood in front of the window. The sky was low and dark and filled with swirling rain. Beyond the quay, in the choppy water off the stern of the ketch, a flotilla of seagulls quarreled noisily. Gabriel went into the kitchen and fixed coffee.

Shamron had left behind a file: ordinary manila folder, no label, a Rorschach-test coffee stain on the back cover next to a cometlike smear of cigarette ash. Gabriel opened it slowly, as if he feared it might explode, and gently lifted it to his nose-the file room at Research, yes, that was it. Attached to the inside of the front cover was a list of every officer who had ever checked out the file. They were all Office pseudonyms and meant nothing to him-except for the last name: Rom, the internal code name for the chief of the service. He turned the first page and looked at the name of the subject, then flipped through a series of grainy surveillance photographs.

He read it once quickly, then poured himself more coffee and read it again more slowly. He had the strange sensation of walking through the rooms of his childhood-everything was familiar but slightly different, a bit smaller than he remembered, a bit shabbier perhaps. As always he was struck by the similarities between the craft of restoration and the craft of killing. The methodology was precisely the same: study the target, become like him, do the job, slip away without a trace. He might have been reading a scholarly piece on Francesco Vecellio instead of an Office case file on a terrorist named Yusef al-Tawfiki.

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

When he had finished it a second time, he opened the cabinet below the sink and removed a stainless steel case. Inside was a gun: a Beretta.22-caliber semiautomatic, specially fitted with a competition-length barrel. The Office weapon of choice for assassinations-quiet, rapid, reliable. Gabriel pressed the release and thumbed the eight cartridges into the magazine. The rounds contained a light power loading, which made the Beretta fire extremely quietly. When Gabriel had killed the Black September operative in Rome, the neighbors mistook the lethal shots for firecrackers. He rammed the magazine into the grip and pulled the slide, chambering the first round. He had fine-tuned the spring in the blowback mechanism to compensate for the light power in the cartridges. He raised the weapon and peered through the sights. An image appeared before his eyes: pale olive skin, soft brown eyes, cropped black hair.

It was Tariq who made the Seine run red with the blood of my people. Tariq-your old friend.

Gabriel lowered the gun, closed the file, pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. He had made himself a promise after the disaster in Vienna. He would leave the Office for good: no return engagements, no trips down memory lane, no contact with headquarters, period. He would restore his paintings and match wits with the sea and try to forget that Vienna ever happened. He had seen too many old-timers get pulled in whenever the Office had a lousy job and no one to do it-too many men who could never quite leave the secret world behind.