Daniel Silva - The Kill Artist

“Can’t you hear what’s going on? The endless lectures on the suffering of the Palestinians? The ruthlessness of the Israelis? The recitation of Palestinian poetry? All the old folklore about how beautiful life was in Palestine before the Jews?”

“What’s your point?”

“Either the boy is in love, or he has something else on his mind.”

“It’s the second possibility that concerns me.”

“Has it ever occurred to you that maybe Yusef thinks of her as more than just a pretty girl? Has it ever occurred to you that he thinks of her as an impressionable girl who might be useful to Tariq and his organization?”

“It has, but she’s not prepared for that kind of operation. And frankly, neither are we.”

“So you want to fold up your tent and go home?”

“No, I just want to pull Jacqueline out.”

“And then what happens? Yusef gets nervous. Yusef gets suspicious and tears apart his flat. If he’s disciplined, he throws out every electrical appliance in the place. And your microphones go with them.”

“If we handle her departure skillfully, he’ll never suspect a thing. Besides, when I hired her, I promised her a short-term job. You know she has other commitments.”

“None more important than this. Pay her wages, full price. She stays, Gabriel. End of discussion.”

“If she stays, I go.”

“Then go!” Shamron snapped. “Go back to Cornwall and bury your head in your Vecellio. I’ll send in someone to take over for you.”

“You know I’m not going to leave her in your hands.”

Shamron quickly moved for appeasement. “You’ve been working around the clock for a long time. You don’t look so good. I haven’t forgotten what it’s like. Forget about Yusef for a few hours. He’s not going anywhere. Take a drive. Do something to clear your head. I need you at your best.”

On the train back to London, Gabriel entered the lavatory and locked the door. He stood for a long time in front of the mirror. There were new lines around his eyes, a sudden tightness at the corners of his mouth, a knife edge to his cheekbones. Beneath his eyes were dark circles, like smudges of charcoal.

“I haven’t forgotten what it’s like.”

The Black September operation… They had all come down with something: heart problems, high blood pressure, skin rashes, chronic colds. The assassins suffered the worst. After the first job in Rome, Gabriel found it impossible to sleep. Every time he closed his eyes he heard bullets tearing through flesh and shattering bone, saw fig wine mingling with blood on a marble floor. Shamron found a doctor in Paris, a sayan, who gave Gabriel a bottle of powerful tranquilizers. Within a few weeks he was addicted to them.

The pills and the stress made Gabriel look shockingly older. His skin hardened, the corners of his mouth turned down, his eyes turned the color of ash. His black hair went gray at the temples. He was twenty-two at the time but looked at least forty. When he went home, Leah barely recognized him. When they made love she said it was like sleeping with another man-not an older version of Gabriel but a complete stranger.

He splashed cold water on his face, scrubbed vigorously with a paper towel, then studied his reflection once more. He contemplated the chain of events-the bizarre roulette wheel of fate-that had led him to this place. Had there been no Hitler, no Holocaust, his parents would have remained in Europe instead of fleeing to a dusty agricultural settlement in the Jezreel Valley. Before the war his father had been an essayist and historian in Munich, his mother a gifted painter in Prague, and neither had adjusted well to the collectivism of the settlement or the Zionist zeal for manual labor. They had treated Gabriel more as a miniature adult than a boy with needs different from their own. He was expected to entertain and look after himself. His earliest childhood memory was of their small two-room house on the settlement: his father reading in his chair, his mother at her easel, Gabriel on the floor between them, building cities with crude blocks.

His parents detested Hebrew, so when they were alone they used the languages they had spoken in Europe: German, French, Czech, Russian, Yiddish. Gabriel absorbed them all. To his European languages he added Hebrew and Arabic. From his father he also took a flawless memory, from his mother unshakable patience and attention to detail. Their disdain for the collective had bred in him arrogance and a lone wolf attitude. Their secular agnosticism had encumbered him with no sense of Jewish morality or ethics. He preferred hiking to football, reading to agriculture. He had an almost pathological fear of getting his hands dirty. He had many secrets. One of his teachers described him as “cold, selfish, unfeeling, and altogether brilliant.” When Ari Shamron went looking for soldiers in the new secret war against Arab terror in Europe, he came upon the boy from the Jezreel Valley who, like his namesake, the Archangel Gabriel, had an unusual gift for languages and the patience of Solomon. Shamron found one other valuable personality trait: the emotional coldness of a killer.

Gabriel left the lavatory and went back to his seat. Beyond his window was East London: rows of crumbling Victorian warehouses, all shattered windows and broken brick. He closed his eyes. Something else had made them all sick during the Black September operation: fear. The longer they remained in the field, the higher the risk of exposure-not only to the intelligence services of Europe but to the terrorists themselves. That point was driven home in the middle of the operation, when Black September murdered a katsa in Madrid. Suddenly every member of the team knew that he too was vulnerable. And it taught Gabriel the most valuable lesson of his career: when agents are operating far from home, in hostile territory, hunters can easily become the hunted.

The train pulled into Waterloo. Gabriel strode across the platform, sliced his way through the crowded arrivals hall. He had left his car in an underground car park. He dropped his keys, engaged in his ritualistic inspection, then climbed inside and drove to Surrey.

There was no sign at the gate. Gabriel had always wanted a place with no sign. Beyond the wall was a well-tended lawn with evenly spaced trees. At the end of a meandering drive stood a rambling redbrick Victorian mansion. He lowered the car window and pressed the button of the intercom. The lens of a security camera stared down at him like a gargoyle. Gabriel instinctively turned his face away from the camera and pretended to fish something from the glove compartment.

“May I help you?” Female voice, Middle European accent.

“I’m here to see Miss Martinson. Dr. Avery is expecting me.”

He raised the window, waited for the automatic security gate to roll aside; then he entered the grounds and headed slowly up the drive. Late afternoon, cold and gray, light wind chasing through the trees. As he drew closer to the house, he began to see a few of the patients. A woman sitting on a bench, dressed in her Sunday best, staring blankly into space. A man in an oilskin and Wellington boots strolling on the arm of a towering Jamaican orderly.

Avery was waiting in the entrance hall. He wore expensive corduroy trousers, the color of rust and neatly pressed, and a gray cashmere pullover sweater that looked more suited to the golf links than a psychiatric hospital. He shook Gabriel’s hand with a cold formality, as though Gabriel were the representative of an occupying power, then led him down a long carpeted hallway.

“She’s been speaking quite a bit more this month,” Avery said. “We’ve actually had a meaningful conversation on a couple of occasions.”

Gabriel managed a tense smile. In all these years she had never spoken to him. “And her physical health?” he asked.