The English Assassin (Gabriel Allon 02) Page 11

  THEkeys to Debré’s car were still in the ignition. The Englishman used them to open the trunk. Inside was another suitcase. He lifted the lid. A second bomb, a duplicate of the one resting on the hood of the car. He supposed the Frenchman had scheduled another job later that night. The Englishman had probably saved someone’s shop. He closed the lid of the suitcase, then softly lowered the trunk.

  The floor was covered in blood. The Englishman walked around the corpses and stood over the hood of the car. He opened the suitcase and set the time for three minutes, then closed the lid and placed the case between the bodies.

  He walked deliberately across the warehouse and opened the door. Then he went back to the car and climbed behind the wheel. When he turned the key, the engine coughed and died.Dear God, no—Pascal’s revenge. He turned it a second time, and the engine roared into life.

  He backed out, turned around in the drive, and sped through the gate in the chain-link fence. When the bomb went off, the flash in his rearview mirror was so bright that for a moment he was blinded. He followed the river road back toward Paris, purple spots floating in his vision.

  Ten minutes later, he parked Debré’s car in a tow zone near a Métro stop and got out. He removed the suitcase from the trunk and dropped the keys into a rubbish bin. Then he walked downstairs and boarded a train.

  He thought about the oldsignadora back in his village on Corsica—her warning abut the mysterious man whom he should avoid. He wondered if Pascal Debré had been that man.

  He got out at the Luxembourg stop and walked through the wet streets of the fifth, back to his hotel on the rue St-Jacques. Upstairs in his room it occurred to him that he hadn’t seen a single policeman during the trip home. Debré had definitely been lying about the checkpoints.

  17

  PARIS

  GABRIEL DECIDEDit was time to talk to Werner Müller. The next morning, he rang the gallery.

  “Müller.Bonjour. ”

  “Do you speak German?”

  “Ja.”

  Gabriel switched from French to German.

  “I saw a painting in the window of your gallery over the weekend that I’m interested in.”

  “Which one was that?”

  “The flower arrangement by Jean-Georges Hirn.”

  “Yes, lovely, isn’t it?”

  “Indeed, it is. I was wondering if I might be able to see it sometime today.”

  “I’m afraid I’m rather busy today.”

  “Oh, really?”

  Gabriel had been monitoring all calls to the gallery for seventy-two hours and was quite certain Müller could find time for an appointment.

  “Just let me get my book and have a look at the schedule. Can you hold on a moment?”

  “Of course.”

  “Yes, here it is. As it turns out, I’ve had an unexpected cancellation this afternoon.”

  “How fortunate.”

  “How quickly could you be here?”

  “Actually, I’m in the neighborhood now. I could be there in ten or fifteen minutes.”

  “Splendid. And your name?”

  “Ulbricht.”

  “I look forward to seeing you, Herr Ulbricht.”

  Gabriel severed the connection. He packed quickly, tucked the Beretta into the waistband of his trousers, then took one last look around the room to make certain he’d left no trace of himself behind. Before leaving, he walked to the window and peered down at the gallery. A man was ringing the bell: medium height, dark hair, an attaché case in his right hand. Perhaps Müller’s appointment didn’t cancel after all. Gabriel quickly dug out his camera and used up the roll taking photographs of the unexpected visitor. Then he removed the film, slipped it in his pocket, and placed the camera in his bag.

  At the front counter, the desk manager expressed elaborate sorrow that Herr Kiever was leaving so soon. He asked whether the work had gone well and Gabriel said that he would know soon enough.

  Outside, rain fell softly on his face. The Renault was parked on the street around the corner from the hotel, two tickets pinned to the windshield by the wiper blade. Gabriel stuffed them into his pocket and tossed the bag into the trunk.

  He glanced at his watch. Twelve minutes had passed since he and Müller had spoken on the telephone. He should be a few minutes late—the German would expect that. He walked around the block twice to see if he was being followed, then went to the gallery and rang the bell. Müller opened the door to him.

  “Good morning, Herr Ulbricht. I was beginning to worry about you.”

  “Actually, I had a bit of trouble finding the place again.”

  “You don’t live in Paris?”

  “I’m here on holiday, actually. I live in Düsseldorf.”

  “I see.” Müller clapped his hands together theatrically. “So, you’d like to have a closer look at the Hirn. I don’t blame you. It’s an absolutely gorgeous painting. A fine addition to any collection. Let me remove it from the window. I’ll just be a moment.”

  While Müller busied himself with the Hirn, Gabriel quickly looked around the room. Ordinary gallery, very ordinary paintings. At the end of the room was Müller’s desk, a hand-painted antique affair, and on the floor next to the desk was an attaché.

  Müller lifted the painting from the display stand in the window. It was a small work, about eighteen inches by twelve, and Müller had no trouble handling the frame. He placed it on a felt-covered pedestal in the center of the room and switched on some additional lights.

  As Gabriel moved into position to view the canvas, he glanced out the front window of the gallery. Something caught his eye in the café across the street. Something familiar, a flash, nothing more.

  He turned his attention to the canvas and murmured a few kind words about the quality of the brushwork and the draftsmanship. “You seem to know something about art, Herr Ulbricht,” Müller said.

  “Just enough so that I spend all my money buying paintings I really can’t afford,” said Gabriel, and the two men shared a good-natured laugh.

  Gabriel lifted his eyes from the Hirn and glanced out the window toward the café. There it was again, the sensation that he had seen something, or someone, before. He scanned the tables beneath the awning, and then he saw it. The man, folding his newspaper, standing up, walking away quickly. A man in a hurry, a man late for an important meeting. Gabriel had seen the man before.

  The man who had just left the gallery . . .

  Gabriel turned and glanced at the attaché. Then he looked out the window again, but the man had rounded a corner and was gone.

  “Is there something wrong, Herr Ulbricht?”

  Gabriel grabbed Müller’s forearm. “You have to get out of the gallery! Now!”

  The art dealer twisted his arm and broke Gabriel’s grasp. He was surprisingly powerful.

  “Get your hand off me, you madman!”

  Gabriel grabbed Müller’s arm again, but once again he pulled away.

  “Get out of here, or I’m going to call the police.”

  Gabriel could have easily subdued Müller, but he guessed there wasn’t time. He turned and walked quickly toward the door. By the time he arrived, Müller had released the security locks. Gabriel stepped into the street and started walking in the direction of the hotel.

  And then the bomb exploded—a deafening thunderclap that knocked Gabriel to his hands and knees. He stood and started walking again as the sound of the blast echoed along the graceful facades of the surrounding streets. Then there was something that sounded like a tropical downpour but it was only the glass, raining onto the pavement from a thousand shattered windows. He raised his hands to shield his face but after a few seconds his fingers ran red with his own blood.

  The shower of glass ended, the echo of the explosion receded into the distance. Gabriel resisted the impulse to look over his shoulder at the devastation. He had seen the results of a street bomb before and could imagine the scene behind him. Burning cars, blackened buildings, a devastated café, b
odies, and blood, the stunned looks on the faces of the survivors. So he removed his hands from his face and hid them in the pockets of his jacket, and he kept walking, head down, ears ringing with the awful silence.

  18

  PARIS

  PARIS HAD SUFFEREDits unfair share of terrorist bombings over the years, and the French police and security services had become quite efficient at dealing with the aftermath. Within two minutes of the explosion, the first units arrived. Within five minutes, the surrounding streets were sealed. Gabriel’s car had been caught inside the cordon, so he had been forced to flee on foot. It was nearly dusk by the time he reached the sprawling rail yard on the southern edge of the city.

  Now, sheltering in the loading bay of an abandoned factory, he took mental inventory of the things in the trunk. A suitcase, a few items of clothing, a camera, a tape recorder, the radio he had used to communicate with the surveillance team. If the car was not collected soon, the police would impound it, break open the trunk, and examine the contents. They would play the audiotape and discover that Werner Müller’s gallery and telephones had been bugged. They would develop exposed rolls of film and discover photographs of the gallery’s exterior. They would calculate the angle of the photographs and surmise that they had been taken from a window of the Hôtel Laurens. They would question the staff at the hotel and discover that the room in question had been occupied by a rude German writer.

  Gabriel’s right hand began to throb. The strain was catching up with him. He’d stayed on the move after the bombing, ridden a dozen Métro trains, walked countless miles along the crowded boulevards. From a public telephone near the Luxembourg Gardens, he had made contact with Uzi Navot on the emergency channel.

  Gabriel looked up now and saw two cars moving slowly along a narrow service road bordered by a sagging chain-link fence. The headlights were doused. The cars stopped about fifty yards away. Gabriel jumped down from the loading dock—the landing sent shock waves of pain through his hands—and walked toward them. The rear door of the first car flew open. Navot was slumped in the backseat. “Get in,” he grumbled. Clearly, he had watched too many American movies about the Mafia.

  Navot had brought a doctor, one of Ari Shamron’ssayanim . He was sitting in the front passenger seat. He made an operating table of the center armrest, spreading a sterile cloth over it and switching on the dome light. The doctor cut away the dressing and examined the wound. He pulled his lips into a mild frown—Not so bad. You bring me here for this?“Something for the pain?” he asked, but Gabriel shook his head. Another frown, another tip of the head—As you wish.

  The doctor flushed the wound with an antiseptic solution and went to work. Gabriel, the restorer, watched him intently.Insert, pull, tug, snip. Navot lit a cigarette and pretended to look out the window. When the doctor had finished the suturing, he dressed the wound carefully and nodded that he was done. Gabriel laid his right hand upon the sterile towel. As the doctor cut away the dirty dressing, he emitted a very French sigh of disapproval, as if Gabriel had ordered the wrong wine for fish with saffron butter sauce. “This one will take a few minutes, yes?” Navot waved his hand impatiently.

  The doctor didn’t care for Navot’s attitude, and he took his time about it. This time he didn’t bother to ask Gabriel whether he wanted anything for the pain. He simply prepared a syringe and injected an anesthetic into Gabriel’s hand. He worked slowly and steadily for almost a half-hour. Then he looked up. “I did the best I could, under the circumstances.” A hostile glance toward Navot—I do this for free, boy. Shamron is going to hear about this.“You need proper surgery on that wound. The muscles, the tendons—” A pause, a shake of the head. “Not good. You’re likely to experience some stiffness, and your range of motion will never be quite the same.”

  “Leave us,” Navot said. “Go to the other car and wait there.” Navot dismissed the driver too. When they were alone, he looked at Gabriel. “What the hell happened?”

  “How many dead?” Gabriel asked, ignoring Navot’s question.

  “Three, so far. Four more in bad shape.”

  “Have you heard from the rest of the team?”

  “They’ve left Paris. Shamron is bringing everyone home. This could get ugly.”

  “The car?”

  “We’ve got a man watching it. So far, the police haven’t made a move on it.”

  “Eventually, they will.”

  “What are they going to find when they do?”

  Gabriel told him. Navot closed his eyes and swayed a bit, as though he had just been told of a death. “What about Müller’s apartment?”

  “There’s a glass on his telephone.”

  “Shit.”

  “Any chance of getting inside and cleaning things up?”

  Navot shook his head. “The police are already there. If they find your car and establish that Müller was under surveillance of some sort they’ll tear apart his flat. It won’t take them long to find the bug.”

  “Any friends on the force that might be able to help us?”

  “Not for something like this.”

  “That bug is like a calling card.”

  “I know, Gabriel, but I wasn’t the one who put it there.”

  Gabriel fished the roll of film from his pocket and handed it to Navot. “I got a picture of the man who left the bomb at the gallery. Get it to King Saul Boulevard tonight. Tell the troglodytes in Research to run it through the database. Maybe they can put a name to his face.”

  The film disappeared into Navot’s big paw.

  “Contact Shamron and tell him to get a security detail up to Anna Rolfe’s villa right away.” Gabriel opened the car door and put his foot on the ground. “Which car is mine?”

  “Shamron wants you to come home.”

  “I can’t find the man who planted that bomb if I’m sitting in Tel Aviv.”

  “You won’t be able to find him if you’re sitting in a French jail cell, either.”

  “Which car is mine, Uzi?”

  “All right! Take this one. But you’re on your own.”

  “Someday, I’ll try to repay the favor.”

  “Have a good time, Gabriel. I’ll stay here and clean up your fucking mess.”

  “Just get the film to Tel Aviv. Good dog.”

  ONthe Costa de Prata, Anna Rolfe lowered her violin and switched off the metronome. Her practice room was in shadow, the breeze from the open window cool and moist with the Atlantic. A professional-quality microphone hung over her stool from a chrome-colored stand. It was connected to a German-made tape deck. Today she had recorded much of her practice session. She played back the tape while she packed the Guarneri into its case and straightened her sheet music.

  As always, she found it uncomfortable to listen to herself play, but she did it now for a very specific reason. She wanted to knowexactly how she sounded; which passages of the piece were acceptable and which needed additional attention. She liked much of what she heard but picked out three or four sections in the second and third movements where the effects of her long layoff were apparent to her highly critical ear. Tonight, in her second practice session, she would focus exclusively on those passages. For now, she needed to clear her mind.

  She went to her bedroom, removed a pale yellow sweater from her dresser drawer, and wrapped it around her shoulders. Then she went downstairs. A moment later, she slipped through the gate of her villa and set out along the winding track down toward the village. At the halfway point, she spotted a tiny Fiat station wagon coming up the track through the trees. Inside were four men. They were not Portuguese. Anna stepped to the side to allow the car to pass, but it stopped instead, and the man seated in the front passenger seat got out.

  “Miss Rolfe?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “You are MissAnna Rolfe, aren’t you?”

  She nodded.

  “We’re friends of Gabriel’s.”

  INMarseille, the Englishman left his car near the Abbaye St-Victor and walked t
hrough the darkened streets to the ferry terminal. As the vessel slipped over the calm waters of the harbor, he went downstairs to his private cabin. He lay on the narrow bed, listening to the news on Marseille radio. The bombing of the Müller Gallery in Paris was the lead item. Pascal Debré’s bomb had caused innocent casualties, a fact which made him feel a good deal more like a terrorist than a professional. Tomorrow he would go see the oldsignadora, and she would chase away theocchju with her rituals and prayers and absolve him of his sins, the way she always did.

  He switched off the radio. In spite of his fatigue, he wanted a woman. It was always that way after the completion of an assignment. He closed his eyes and Elizabeth appeared in his thoughts—Elizabeth Conlin, the pretty Catholic girl from the Ballymurphy housing estates, West Belfast, Northern Ireland. She’d had the instincts of a good professional. When it was safe for them to meet, she would hang a violet scarf in her bedroom window, and the Englishman would crawl through the window and into her bed. They would make love with excruciating slowness, so as not to wake the other members of her family. The Englishman would cover her mouth with the palm of his hand to smother her cries. Once she bit down on the flesh of his thumb and drew blood. It stained the sheets of her bed. Afterward, he would lie next to her in the dark and let her tell him again how she wanted to get away from Belfast—away from the bombs and the British soldiers, the IRA gunmen and the Protestant paramilitaries. And when she thought he was sleeping, she would whisper a rosary, her penance for succumbing to the temptations of the Englishman’s body. The Englishman never allowed himself to fall asleep in Elizabeth Conlin’s bed.

  One night when he crawled through her window, Elizabeth Conlin had been replaced by her father and two IRA enforcers. Somehow they knew the truth about the Englishman. He was driven to a remote farmhouse for what promised to be a lengthy and painful interrogation, followed by his own execution. Unlike most who had found themselves in a similar situation, the Englishman managed to leave the farmhouse alive. Four IRA men did not.