The English Assassin (Gabriel Allon 02)

by Daniel Silva

  Anna shook her head.

  “And your mother’s suicide?”

  “I was the one who found her body.” She hesitated for a moment, then said: “One never forgets something like that. Afterward, my father told us she’d had a history of depression. I loved my mother dearly, Gabriel. We were extremely close. My mother did not suffer from depression. She wasn’t taking any medication, she wasn’t under the care of a psychiatrist. She was moody, she was temperamental, but she was not the kind of woman who commits suicide for no reason. Something or someonemade her take her own life. Only my father knew what it was, and he kept it secret from us.”

  “Did she leave a suicide note?”

  “According to the inquest, there was no note. But I saw my father take something from her body that looked very much like a note. He never showed it to me, and apparently he never showed it to the police either.”

  “And the death of your brother?”

  “It happened a year later. My father wanted him to go to work in the bank and carry on the family tradition, but Max wanted to race bicycles. And that’s exactly what he did—quite well, in fact. He was one of the best riders in Switzerland and a top European professional. He was killed in an accident during the Tour of Switzerland. My father was devastated, but at the same time, I think he felt a certain vindication. It was as if Max had been punished for daring to contradict his wishes.”

  “And you?”

  “I was alone with him. The two people I loved most in the world were gone, and I was trapped with a man I loathed. I threw myself more deeply into violin. The arrangement seemed to suit both of us. As long as I was playing music, my father didn’t have to pay any attention to me. He was free to do what he loved most.”

  “Which was?”

  “Making money, of course. He thought his wealth absolved him of his sins. He was such a fool. From the beginning of my career, people thought I played with such fire. They didn’t realize that fire was fueled by hatred and pain.”

  Gabriel broached the next subject cautiously. “What do you know about your father’s activities during the war?”

  “Activities? That’s an interesting word. What are you trying to imply by that?”

  “I meant nothing by it. I just need to know whether there was something in your father’s past that might have led to his murder.”

  “My father was a banker in Switzerland during the Second World War.” Her voice had turned suddenly cold. “That doesn’t automatically make him a monster. But to be perfectly honest, I know virtually nothing about my father’sactivities during the war. It was not something he ever discussed with us.”

  Gabriel thought of information Emil Jacobi had given him in Lyons: Rolfe’s frequent trips to Nazi Germany; the rumors of Rolfe’s connection to important members of the Nazi hierarchy. Had Rolfe really managed to keep all these things secret from his daughter? Gabriel decided to push it a little further—gently.

  “But you have your suspicions, don’t you, Anna? You’d have never taken me to Zurich if you didn’t have suspicions about your father’s past.”

  “I only know one thing, Gabriel: My mother dug her own grave, climbed inside, and shot herself. It was a hateful, vengeful thing to do. And she did it for a reason.”

  “Was he dying?”

  The bluntness of this final question seemed to take her by surprise, for she looked up suddenly, as though prodded by a sharp object. “My father?”

  Gabriel nodded.

  “As a matter of fact, Gabriel, yes, my father was dying.”

  WHENthe food was gone, Gabriel poured out the last of the wine and asked her about the provenance.

  “They’re locked in the desk of my father’s study.”

  “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

  “Why do you want to see them?”

  “I want to look at the chain of possession for each work. The provenance might tell us something about who took them and why your father was killed.”

  “Or it might tell you nothing at all. And remember one thing: My father purchased all those paintings legally. They belonged to him, no matter what quirk you might find in the provenance.”

  “I’d still like to see them.”

  “I’ll show you where they are.”

  “No, you’lltell me where they are, and I’ll get them and bring them back here. You can’t come to Zurich now.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s not safe. Which leads me to my next topic.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Your recital in Venice.”

  “I’m not canceling it.”

  “It’s not safe for you to perform in public now.”

  “I don’t have a choice. If I don’t keep this engagement, my career is over.”

  “The people who killed your father have made it abundantly clear that they’ll do anything to prevent us from finding their identity. That would include killing you too.”

  “Then you’ll just have to make certain they don’t succeed, but I’m going to perform next week, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

  COLUMNSof gunmetal cloud had appeared over the sea and started their advance inland. A chill wind rose and moaned in the ruins. Anna shivered in the abrupt cold and folded her arms beneath her breasts, her eyes on the approaching weather. Gabriel packed up the remains of their lunch, and in the gathering darkness they ambled down the hill, shadowed by the two silent watchers. When they reached the footpaths of the pine grove it began to rain heavily. “Too late,” Anna shouted above the pounding. “We’re caught.” She took him by the arm and led him to the shelter of a towering pine. “We need to keep your bandages dry,” she said, a note of concern creeping into her voice. She dug a wrinkled nylon anorak from the pocket of the rucksack and held it over their heads, and there they huddled for the next twenty minutes like a pair of refugees, Rami’s watchers standing silently on either side of them like andirons. While they waited for the weather to break, Anna told Gabriel the security codes for the villa and the location of the provenance in her father’s files. When finally the rain moved off, Anna bound Gabriel’s hands in the anorak, and they proceeded carefully down the wet track to the villa. At the front gate, Gabriel relinquished her into the custody of Rami and climbed into his car. As he drove away, he took one last look over his shoulder and saw Anna Rolfe chasing Rami across the drive, shouting, “Bang, bang, Rami! You’re dead!”

  23

  LISBON

  MOTZKIN LIKED ITin Lisbon. He’d done the glamour postings. He’d done London. He’d done Paris and Brussels. He’d spent a nail-biting year in Cairo posing as a journalist from a newspaper in Ottawa. It was quiet in Lisbon these days, and that was fine with Motzkin. The odd surveillance job, a bit of liaison work. Just enough to keep him from going stir crazy. He had time for his books and his stamps and for long siestas with his girl in the Alfama.

  He had just returned from her flat when the telephone on his desk rattled softly. Motzkin lifted the receiver and brought it cautiously to his ear. This was the time Ari Shamron usually chose to poke his head out of his foxhole and make life miserable for hiskatsas. But thankfully it wasn’t Shamron—just the guard down in the lobby. It seemed there was a visitor, a man who knew Motzkin’s name.

  Motzkin rang off and punched up the lobby surveillance camera on his computer monitor. The station regularly fielded walk-ins of all shapes and sizes. Usually a quick once-over could determine whether the person should be seen or frog-marched to the gate.

  As the image appeared on his screen, Motzkin murmured: “I’ll be damned.” Imagine, the living legend, walking into the embassy, looking like something the proverbial cat dragged in. Last Motzkin had heard, he was holed up in some English cottage with his paintings and his demons. “I’ll be damned,” he repeated as he clambered down the stairs. “Is it really you?”

  INthe communications room, Motzkin established a secure link with Shamron’s office at King Saul Boulevard in Tel Av
iv. Then he closed the soundproof door and watched Gabriel through the glass. It was an unpleasant conversation; that much Motzkin could tell. But then there were few people inside the Office who hadn’t crossed swords with the old man at one time or another, and the battles between Shamron and the great Gabriel Allon were the stuff of Office lore. Twenty minutes later, when Gabriel slammed down the telephone and stepped out of the room, his face was ashen.

  “The old man is sending a report through in thirty minutes. I need a few things.”

  Motzkin took Gabriel upstairs to the station and allowed him to shower and change into clean clothing. Then he arranged airline tickets and a car and gave him two thousand dollars from the petty-cash box.

  By the time they returned to the communications room, the report was sliding off the secure fax machine. It had been compiled by Research Section at King Saul Boulevard and was based on information shared through standing agreements with British and French intelligence.

  The subject was a man named Christopher Keller.

  Gabriel scooped the pages from the tray, sat down at the table, and started to read.

  BORNin London, the only son of two successful Harley Street physicians, Christopher Keller made it clear at an early age that he had no intention of following in the footsteps of his parents. Obsessed with history, especially military history, he wanted to become a soldier. His parents forbade him to enter the military, and he acceded to their wishes, at least for a time. He entered Cambridge and began reading history and Oriental languages. He was a brilliant student, but in his second year he grew restless and one night vanished without a trace. A few days later he surfaced at his father’s Kensington home, hair cut to the scalp, dressed in an olive-drab uniform. Keller had enlisted in the British Army.

  After basic training, he joined his infantry regiment, but his intellect, physical prowess, and lone-wolf attitude quickly set him apart from his peers. Soon a recruiter from the Special Air Service came knocking. He had seen Keller’s file and spoken to his superiors. Keller was invited to the Regiment’s headquarters at Hereford to undergo the initial training course.

  His performance was extraordinary. The instructors in the unarmed combat course wrote that they had never seen a man who possessed such an instinctual knack for the taking of human life. In the “killing house”—an infamous facility where recruits practice close-quarters combat, hostage rescue, and antiterrorist “room clearing” drills—Keller achieved the highest possible scores. On the final day of the course, he carried a fifty-five-pound rucksack and ten-pound assault rifle during a forty-mile march across the windswept moorland known as the Brecon Beacons, an endurance test that had left men dead. Keller completed the course thirty minutes faster than any man had ever done it before. He was accepted into the Regiment and assigned to a Sabre squadron specializing in mobile desert warfare.

  Then the course of his career took an abrupt turn. Another man appeared on the scene, this time from military intelligence. He was looking for a unique brand of soldier capable of performing close observation and other special operations in Northern Ireland. He said he was impressed by Keller’s linguistic skills and his ability to improvise and think on his feet. Was Keller interested? That night he packed his kit and moved from Hereford to a secret base in the Scottish Highlands.

  During his training Keller displayed a remarkable gift. For years, British security and intelligence forces had struggled with the myriad of accents in Northern Ireland. In Ulster, the opposing communities could identify each other by the sound of a voice. The accent of Catholic West Belfast is different from that of Protestant West Belfast; the accent of the Upper Falls Road is different from that of the Lower Falls. The way a man uttered a few simple phrases could mean the difference between life and an appalling death. Keller developed the ability to mimic the intonations perfectly. He could even shift accents at a moment’s notice—a Catholic from Armagh one minute, a Protestant from Belfast’s Shankill Road the next, then a Catholic from the Ballymurphy housing estates. He operated in Belfast for more than a year, tracking members of the IRA, picking up bits of useful gossip from the surrounding community. He worked alone, with almost no supervision from his case officer at military intelligence.

  His assignment in Northern Ireland came to an abrupt end one night when he was kidnapped in West Belfast and driven to a remote farmhouse in County Armagh. There, he was accused of being a British spy. Keller knew the situation was hopeless, so he decided to fight his way out. By the time he left the farmhouse, four hardened terrorists from the Provisional Irish Republican Army were dead. Two had been virtually cut to pieces.

  Keller returned to Hereford for a long rest. He took punishing hikes on the Brecon Beacons and trained new recruits in the art of silent killing. But it was clear to the Regiment’s commanders and psychologists that Belfast had changed Keller.

  Then in August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Five months later, Keller and his unit were roaming the western desert of Iraq, searching out and destroying the Scud missile launchers that were raining terror on Tel Aviv. On the night of January 28, Keller and his team located a launcher in the desert one hundred miles northwest of Baghdad. He passed along the coordinates to his commanders in Saudi Arabia. Ninety minutes later, a formation of Coalition fighter-bombers streaked low over the desert, but in a disastrous case of friendly fire, they attacked the SAS squadron instead of the Scud site. British officials concluded that the entire unit was lost, though no conclusive remains were ever found.

  What came next was essentially a theory—again based on intelligence reports. Some months after the disaster in the Iraqi desert, a new and highly professional killer was reported to be working in Europe. Police informants spoke of a man known only as “the Englishman.” None could offer more than the vaguest descriptions of him. To date, the mysterious assassin was a suspect in at least twenty unsolved murders. British intelligence suspected that Christopher Keller and the Englishman were the same man.

  The file concluded with two photographs. The first was the one Gabriel had taken of the man entering the gallery in Paris. The second showed a group of men on a deserted moorland. One of the faces was circled. Gabriel spent a long time comparing the two pictures. Then he picked up the telephone and called Shamron in Tel Aviv. “I have the strangest sensation I’ve actually met this man before,” Gabriel told him. He had expected Shamron to be surprised by the remark. Instead, the old man told him to stay near the fax machine, and then he rang off.

  IN1988, Gabriel Allon carried out one of the most celebrated operations in the history of Israeli intelligence: the assassination of the PLO’s second-in-command, Abu Jihad. He had conducted a long and dangerous surveillance operation on the Palestinian’s villa in Tunis, and he had trained the hit team at a mockup in the Negev desert. Then, one warm night in April, he led a team of Sayaret commandos into the house and shot Abu Jihad to death in front of his wife and children. Thinking about that night now, he could still see the look of pure hatred in their dark eyes.

  Eighteen months after the assassination, a team of British intelligence and SAS officers involved in the fight against IRA terror came to Tel Aviv to study the tactics of the Israelis. Ari Shamron summoned Gabriel to the Academy and compelled him to deliver a luncheon lecture on the Tunis operation. One of the men attending the lecture was an SAS lieutenant.

  The item that came across the fax machine was a photograph. It had been taken after the luncheon to commemorate the spirit of cooperation between the secret warriors of the two countries. Gabriel, eternally camera-shy, wore sunglasses and a sun hat to conceal his identity. The man next to him stared directly into the camera lens. Gabriel carefully examined the face.

  It was Christopher Keller.

  24

  MUNICH

  ZURICH

  THE COURIER WAS WAITINGfor Gabriel at the gate in Munich. He had hair the color of caramel and carried a sign that saidMR .KRAMER —HELLER ENTERPRISES. Gabriel followed him through the
terminal and across the carpark through blowing snow until they came to a dark-blue Mercedes sedan.

  “There’s a Beretta in the glove box and some brisket on the backseat.”

  “Youbodlim think of everything.”

  “We live to serve.” He handed Gabriel the keys.“Bon voyage.”

  Gabriel climbed behind the wheel and started the engine. Ten minutes later he was speeding along the E54 motorway back to Zurich.

  THESwiss are an insular and tribal people, possessing an almost animal instinct to spot outsiders. Anything out of the ordinary is reported to the police, no matter how insignificant. Indeed, the Swiss citizenry is so vigilant that foreign intelligence agencies operating inside the country regard them as a second security service. With this fact in mind, Gabriel was careful to project an image of familiarity as he walked from his car to Augustus Rolfe’s villa.

  He thought of an Office operation a few years earlier. A team of agents had been sent to Switzerland to bug the flat of a suspected Arab terrorist living in a small town outside Bern. An old lady spotted the team outside the Arab’s apartment house and telephoned the police to report a group of suspicious men in her neighborhood. A few minutes later the team was in custody, and the fiasco was reported around the world.

  He climbed the slope of the Rosenbühlweg. The familiar silhouette of the Rolfe villa, with its turrets and its towering portico, rose above him. A car passed, leaving two ribbons of black in the fresh snow.

  He punched in the code to the keyless entry system. The buzzer howled, the dead bolt snapped back. He pushed open the gate and climbed the steps. Two minutes later he was inside Rolfe’s villa, padding across the dark entrance hall, a small flashlight in one hand, a Beretta in the other.

  ONthe second-floor corridor, the darkness was absolute. Gabriel moved forward through the pencil-width beam of his flashlight. The study would be on his left, Anna had said—overlooking the street, first door past the bust. Gabriel turned the knob. Locked.But of course. He removed a pair of small metal tools from his coat pocket. God, how long had it been? The Academy, a hundred years earlier. He had been a green recruit, and Shamron had stood over him the entire time, shouting abuse in his ear. “You have fifteen seconds. Your teammates are dead unless you get that door open, Gabriel!”