Daniel Silva - The English Girl

“What’s your name?” he asked of the driver.

“Lior.”

“Where are you from, Lior?”

“Beersheba.”

“It was a good place to be a kid?”

“There are worse places.”

“How old are you?”

“I’m twenty-five.”

Twenty-five, thought Gabriel. Why did it have to be twenty-five? He looked at his wristwatch again. Not at the time. The date.

“What were your instructions?” he asked of the driver, who just happened to be twenty-five.

“I was told to take you to Ben Gurion.”

“Anything else?”

“They said you might want to make a stop along the way.”

“Who said that? Was it Uzi?”

“No,” replied the driver, shaking his head. “It was the Old Man.”

So, thought Gabriel. He remembered. He glanced at his watch again. The date …

“Well?” asked the driver.

“Take me to the airport,” replied Gabriel.

“No stops?”

“Just one.”

The driver slipped the car into gear and eased slowly from the curb, as though he were joining a funeral procession. He didn’t bother to ask where they were going. It was the twenty-seventh of September. And Shamron remembered.

They drove to the Garden of Gethsemane and then followed the narrow, winding path up the slope of the Mount of Olives. Gabriel entered the cemetery alone and walked through the sea of headstones, until he arrived at the grave of Daniel Allon, born September 27, 1988, died January 13, 1991. Died on a snowy night in the First District of Vienna, in a blue Mercedes automobile that was blown to bits by a bomb. The bomb had been planted by a Palestinian master terrorist named Tariq al-Hourani, on the direct orders of Yasir Arafat. Gabriel had not been the target; that would have been too lenient. Tariq and Arafat had wanted to punish him by forcing him to watch the death of his wife and child, so that he would spend the rest of his life grieving, like the Palestinians. Only one element of the plot had failed. Leah had survived the inferno. She lived now in a psychiatric hospital atop Mount Herzl, trapped in a prison of memory and a body destroyed by fire. Afflicted with a combination of post-traumatic stress syndrome and psychotic depression, she relived the bombing constantly. Occasionally, however, she experienced flashes of lucidity. During one such interlude, she had granted Gabriel permission to marry Chiara. Look at me, Gabriel. There’s nothing left of me. Nothing but a memory .

Gabriel glanced at his wristwatch again. Not the date but the time. There was time for one last good-bye. One final torrent of tears. One final apology for failing to search the car for a bomb before allowing Leah to start the engine. Then he staggered from the garden of stone, on the day that used to be his favorite of the year, and climbed into the back of an Office sedan that was driven by a boy of twenty-five.

The boy had the good sense not to speak a word during the journey to the airport. Gabriel entered the terminal like a normal traveler but then went to a room reserved for Office personnel, where he waited for his flight to be called. As he settled into his first-class seat, he felt a wholly unprofessional urge to phone Chiara. Instead, using techniques taught to him in his youth by Shamron, he walled her from his thoughts. For now, there was no Chiara. Or Daniel. Or Leah. There was only Madeline Hart, the kidnapped mistress of British prime minister Jonathan Lancaster. As the plane rose into the darkening sky, she appeared to Gabriel, in oil on canvas, as Susanna bathing in her garden. And leering at her over the wall was a man with an angular face and a small, cruel mouth. The man without a name or country. The forgotten man.

THE CORSICANS SAY that, when approaching their island by boat, they can smell its unique scrubland vegetation long before they glimpse its rugged coastline rising from the sea. Gabriel experienced no such revelation of Corsica, for he journeyed to the island by air, arriving on the morning’s first flight from Orly. It was only when he was behind the wheel of a rented Peugeot, heading south from the airport at Ajaccio, that he caught his first whiff of gorse, briar, rockrose, and rosemary spilling down from the hills. The Corsicans called it the macchia . They cooked with it, heated their homes with it, and took refuge in it in times of war and vendetta. According to Corsican legend, a hunted man could take to the macchia and, if he wished, remain undetected there forever. Gabriel knew just such a man. It was why he wore a red coral hand on a strand of leather around his neck.

After a half hour of driving, Gabriel left the coast road and headed inland. The scent of the macchia grew stronger, as did the walls surrounding the small hill towns. Corsica, like the ancient land of Israel, had been invaded many times—indeed, after the fall of the Roman Empire, the Vandals had plundered Corsica so mercilessly that most of the island’s inhabitants fled the coasts and retreated into the safety of the mountains. Even now, the fear of outsiders remained intense. In one isolated village, an old woman pointed at Gabriel with her index and little fingers in order to ward off the effects of the occhju , the evil eye.

Beyond the village, the road was little more than a single-lane track bordered on both sides by thick walls of macchia . After a mile he came to the entrance of a private estate. The gate was open but in the breach stood an off-road vehicle occupied by a pair of security guards. Gabriel switched off the engine and, placing his hands atop the steering wheel, waited for the men to approach. Eventually, one climbed out and came slowly over. He had a gun in one hand and another shoved into the waistband of his trousers. With only a movement of his thick eyebrows, he inquired about the purpose of Gabriel’s visit.

“I wish to see the don,” Gabriel said in French.

“The don is a very busy man,” the guard replied in the Corsican dialect.

Gabriel removed the talisman from his neck and handed it over. The Corsican smiled.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

It had never taken much to spark a blood feud on the island of Corsica. An insult. An accusation of cheating in the marketplace. The dissolution of an engagement. The pregnancy of an unmarried woman. After the initial spark, unrest inevitably followed. An ox would be killed, a prized olive tree would topple, a cottage would burn. Then the murders would start. And on it would go, sometimes for a generation or more, until the aggrieved parties had settled their differences or given up the fight in exhaustion.

Most Corsican men were more than willing to do their killing themselves. But there were some who needed others to do their blood work for them: notables who were too squeamish to get their hands dirty, or who were unwilling to risk arrest or exile; women who could not kill for themselves or had no male kin to do the deed on their behalf. People like these relied on professional killers known as taddunaghiu . Usually, they turned to the Orsati clan.

The Orsatis had fine land with many olive trees, and their oil was regarded as the sweetest in all of Corsica. But they did more than produce olive oil. No one knew how many Corsicans had died at the hands of Orsati assassins down through the ages, least of all the Orsatis themselves, but local lore placed the number in the thousands. It might have been significantly higher were it not for the clan’s rigorous vetting process. The Orsatis operated by a strict code. They refused to carry out a killing unless satisfied the party before them had indeed been wronged and blood vengeance was required.