The English Girl: A Novel (Gabriel Allon) Page 12

  He told her that he had fallen under the Lubéron’s spell and that he planned to return for a longer stay. A hotel wouldn’t do, he said. In order to experience the real Lubéron, he wanted to rent a villa. And not just any villa. It had to be something substantial, in an area where tourists rarely ventured. Herr Klemp was not a tourist; he was a traveler. “There’s an important difference,” he insisted, though, if there was one, it seemed entirely lost on the woman.

  There was something in Herr Klemp’s demeanor that told her this was going to be a lengthy ordeal. Unfortunately, she had seen many others like him before. He would want to see every property but, in the end, find none to his satisfaction. Still, it was the only job she could find in this place that so enchanted the likes of Herr Klemp, so she offered him a café crème from the automated machine and opened her brochures with as much enthusiasm as she could muster.

  There was a lovely villa north of Apt, but he found it too pedestrian. And then there was a newly remodeled villa in Ménerbes, but its garden was much too small and its furnishings far too modern. And then there was the grand estate outside Lacoste, the one with its own clay tennis court and indoor lap pool, but this offended Herr Klemp’s social democratic sense of fairness. And on it went, villa by villa, town by town, setting by setting, until all that remained was a property south of Apt, in a small agricultural valley planted with vineyards and lavender.

  “It sounds perfect,” said Herr Klemp hopefully.

  “It’s a bit isolated.”

  “Isolated is good.”

  By this point, the woman felt exactly the same way. In fact, if she’d had the power, she would have locked Herr Klemp in the most isolated property in France and thrown away the key. Instead, she opened the brochure and walked him through every room in the house. For some reason, he seemed particularly interested in the entrance hall. There was nothing unusual about it. A heavy timbered door with iron studs. A small decorative table. Two flights of limestone steps. One flight rose to the second level of the house, the other sank into the basement.

  “Is there any other way down besides these stairs?”

  “No.”

  “And no outside entrance to the basement?”

  “No,” the woman repeated. “If you have guests using the bedroom on the lower level, they’ll have to use these stairs.”

  “Are there photos of the lower level?”

  “I’m afraid there’s not much to see. There’s only a spare bedroom and a laundry room.”

  “Is that all?”

  “There’s also a storage room, but it’s off-limits to renters. The owner keeps a padlock on that.”

  “Are there any outbuildings on the property?”

  “There were a long time ago,” she said, “but they were removed during the last renovation.”

  He smiled, closed the brochure, and pushed it across the desk toward the woman.

  “I think we’ve finally found the place,” he said.

  “When are you interested in taking it?”

  “Next spring. But if possible,” he added, “I’d love to have a look at it now.”

  “I’m afraid it’s occupied.”

  “Really? Until when?”

  “The renters are scheduled to depart in three days’ time.”

  “I’m afraid I’m leaving Provence before then.”

  “What a pity,” said the woman.

  Gabriel spent the rest of the afternoon pretending to tour the countryside of the Lubéron by motorbike, and at sunset he was parked in a secluded spot along the rim of the valley with three villas. Keller was due to emerge at six o’clock sharp, but at ten minutes past there was still no sign of him. Then Gabriel felt a presence at his back. Turning abruptly, he saw the Englishman standing in the darkness, as still as a statue.

  “How long have you been there?” asked Gabriel.

  “Ten minutes,” replied Keller.

  Gabriel started the engine. And then they were gone.

  18

  APT, FRANCE

  Keller told the concierge he had been trekking through the mountains, thus the smudges of dirt on his cheeks, the soiled rucksack over his sturdy shoulder, and the smell of the outdoors that clung to his clothing. Upstairs in his room, he shaved with great care, soaked his weary body in a tub of scalding water, and smoked his first cigarette in two days. Then he repaired to the dining room, where he ate an inordinately large meal and drank the most expensive bottle of Bordeaux in the cellar, courtesy of Marcel Lacroix. Satiated, he walked through the quiet streets of the old town to the basilica. The nave was in shadow and deserted except for Gabriel, who was seated before the stand of votive candles. “But are you sure?” he asked when Keller joined him. Yes, said Keller, nodding slowly. He was sure.

  “Did you ever see her?”

  “No.”

  “Then how do you know she’s there?”

  “Because one knows a criminal operation when one sees one,” said Keller assuredly. “They’re either running a meth lab, assembling a dirty bomb, or babysitting a kidnapped English girl. I’m betting on the girl.”

  “How many people are in the house?”

  “Brossard, the woman, and two other Marseilles boys. The boys stay inside during the day, but at night they come outside for a smoke and a bit of fresh air.”

  “Any visitors?”

  Keller shook his head. “The woman left the villa once each day to do some shopping and wave to the neighbors, but there was no other activity.”

  “How long was she away?”

  “One hour and twenty-eight minutes the first day, two hours and twelve minutes the second.”

  “I admire your precision.”

  “I didn’t have much else to keep me occupied.”

  Gabriel asked how Brossard spent his days.

  “He pretends to be on holiday,” Keller replied. “But he also takes a walk around the property to have a look at things. He almost stepped on me a couple of times.”

  “What’s the routine at night?”

  “Someone is always awake. They watch television in the sitting room or hang out in the garden.”

  “How can you tell they’re watching television?”

  “I can see it flickering through the shutters. By the way,” he added, “the shutters are never open. Never.”

  “Any other lights on at night?”

  “Not inside,” said Keller. “But the outside is lit up like a Christmas tree.”

  Gabriel frowned. Keller suppressed a yawn and asked about Paris.

  “It was cold.”

  “Paris or the meeting?”

  “Both,” replied Gabriel. “Especially when I suggested letting the French handle the rescue.”

  “Why on earth would we do that?”

  “That was Graham’s reaction, too.”

  “What a shock.”

  “You seem to have your finger on the pulse of Downing Street.”

  Keller allowed the remark to pass without a response. Gabriel contemplated the flickering votive candles for a moment before telling Keller about the rest of his meeting with Graham Seymour: the Office safe house in Cherbourg, the Office reception committee, the quiet return to England on a forged Office passport. But it was all predicated on one thing. They had to get Madeline out of the villa quickly and quietly. No shootouts. No car chases.

  “Shootouts are for cowboys,” said Keller, “and car chases only happen in the movies.”

  “How do we get through the lights without being seen by the guards?”

  “We don’t.”

  “Explain.”

  Keller did.

  “And if Brossard or one of the others comes downstairs?”

  “It’s possible they might get hurt.”

  “Permanently,” added Gabriel. He looked at Keller seriously for a m
oment. “Do you know what’s going to happen when the police find those bodies? They’ll start asking questions in town. And before long they’ll have a composite sketch of a former SAS man who was supposed to have died in Iraq. Hotel surveillance photographs, too.”

  “That’s what the macchia is for.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I’ll go to ground in Corsica and wait it out.”

  “It might be a long time before you’ll be able to ply your trade again,” Gabriel said. “A very long time.”

  “It’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”

  “For queen and country?”

  “For the girl.”

  Gabriel regarded Keller in silence for a moment. “I take it you have a problem with men who harm innocent women?”

  Keller nodded his head slowly.

  “Anything you want to tell me?”

  “You might find this hard to believe,” said Keller, “but I’m really not in the mood to take a stroll down memory lane with you.”

  Gabriel smiled. “There’s hope for you after all, Keller.”

  “A little,” the Englishman replied.

  Gabriel heard footfalls in the church and, turning, saw the woman in the belted raincoat coming slowly up the nave. Once again she paused before the main altar and made the sign of the cross with great care, forehead to heart, left shoulder to right.

  “The deadline is tomorrow,” said Gabriel. “Which means we have to go in tonight.”

  “The sooner the better.”

  “We need more people to do this the right way,” Gabriel said gloomily.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “A hundred things could go wrong.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “She might not be able to walk.”

  “So we’ll carry her,” said Keller. “It won’t be the first time I’ve carried someone off the battlefield.”

  Gabriel looked at the woman in the tan raincoat staring into space, then at the flickering light of the votive candles.

  “Who do you suppose he is?” he asked after a moment.

  “Who?”

  “Paul.”

  “I don’t know,” said Keller, rising. “But if I ever see him, he’s dead.”

  After leaving the church, Gabriel returned to the hotel and informed management he would be checking out. It was nothing serious, he assured them—a small crisis at home that only he, the peerless Herr Johannes Klemp of Munich, could disentangle. Management smiled regretfully but privately was pleased to see him go. The chambermaids had unanimously declared him the most annoying guest of the season, and Mafuz, the chief bellman, secretly wished him dead.

  It was Mafuz, standing pillar-like at his post by the front door, who saw him gratefully into the night. He rode through the streets of the town for several minutes to make certain he was not being followed. Then, with his headlamp doused, he made his way to the narrow dirt-and-gravel track running along the rim of the valley with three villas. One of the villas, the one in the east, was illuminated as if for a special occasion. Keller was standing amid a coppice of pine, staring at the villa intently. Gabriel joined him and stared at it, too. After a few minutes a shadowed figure appeared in the garden and a lighter flared. Keller extended his arm and whispered, “Bang, bang, you’re dead.”

  They remained in the pine trees until the man had returned to the villa. Then they sat in Keller’s darkened Renault thrashing out the final details of their plan of attack—their positions, their sightlines, their firing lanes, their conduct inside the villa itself. After twenty minutes all that remained to be decided was who would take the shot that would set everything in motion. Gabriel insisted he be the one, but Keller objected. Then he reminded Gabriel that he had achieved the highest score ever recorded in the killing house at Hereford.

  “It was an exercise,” said Gabriel dismissively.

  “A live-fire exercise,” Keller countered.

  “It was still an exercise.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “I once shot a Palestinian terrorist between the eyes from the back of a moving motorcycle.”

  “So what?”

  “The terrorist was sitting in the middle of a crowded café on the boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris.”

  “Yes,” said Keller, feigning boredom, “I think I remember reading something about that in one of my history books.”

  In the end it came down to a coin toss.

  “Don’t miss,” said Gabriel, as he slipped the coin back into his pocket.

  “I never miss.”

  By then, it was approaching ten o’clock, too early to move. Keller closed his eyes and slept while Gabriel sat staring at the lights of the easternmost villa. He imagined a small room on the lower level: a cot, handcuffs, a hood, a bucket for a toilet, insulation to muffle the screaming, a woman who was no longer herself. And for an instant he was walking through Russian snow, toward a dacha on the edge of a birch forest. He blinked away the image and absently fingered the hand of red coral hanging around his neck. When she is dead, he was thinking. Then you will know the truth.

  Four hours later he squeezed Keller’s shoulder. Keller woke instantly, climbed out, and removed the rucksack from the trunk of the car. Inside were two rolls of duct tape, a pair of heavy-duty twenty-four-inch bolt cutters, and two suppressors—one for Keller’s HK45 compact, the other for Gabriel’s Beretta. Gabriel screwed the suppressor into the end of the Beretta’s barrel and swung the rucksack over his shoulder. Then he followed Keller down through the pine trees and over the rim of the valley. There was no moon or stars and not a breath of wind. Keller moved through the scrub and rock formations in complete silence, slowly, as if he were under water. Every few steps he would raise his right hand to freeze Gabriel in his tracks, but otherwise they did not communicate. They did not need to. Every step, every move, had been worked out in advance.

  At the base of the hill, they parted. Keller went to the southern side of the villa and settled into a drainage ditch; Gabriel headed for the eastern side and concealed himself in a thicket of briar. His position was fifty feet beyond the line where the exterior lights of the villa died and the darkness reclaimed the night. Directly opposite was a row of French doors leading from the garden to the sitting room. Through the shutters he could see the flickering light of the television and, he assumed, the faint shadow of a man.

  He looked at his watch. It was 2:37 a.m. Three hours of darkness left. After that, there could be no more trips to the garden for the man inside the villa. Surely he would step outside for one last breath of fresh air and one more glance at the sky, even if there was no moon or stars and not a breath of wind. Then, from the drainage ditch on the southern side of the villa, there would come a single shot. And then it would begin: a cot, handcuffs, a bucket for a toilet, a woman who was no longer herself.

  He glanced at his watch again, saw that only two minutes had passed, and shivered in the cold. Perhaps Keller was right; perhaps he was an indoor spy after all. To help pass the time he removed himself mentally from the thicket of briar and placed himself before a canvas. It was the painting he had left behind in Jerusalem—Susanna bathing in her garden, watched over by the village elders. Once again he cast Madeline in the role of Susanna, though now the wounds he healed were caused not by time but by captivity.

  He worked slowly but steadily, repairing the sores on her wrists, adding flesh to her atrophied shoulders and color to her hollow cheeks. And all the while he kept watch on the passing of the minutes, and on the villa, which appeared to him in the background of the painting. For two hours there was no movement. Then, as the first light appeared in the eastern sky, one of the French doors opened slowly and a man stepped into Madeline’s garden. He stretched his arms, looked left, then right, then left again. At Madeline’s request, Gabriel quickly completed the restoration. And when he saw a flash of
light from the south, he rose from his knees, gun in hand, and started running.

  19

  THE LUBÉRON, FRANCE

  By the time Gabriel breached the outer limits of the light, he could see Keller charging hard and fast across the garden. The Englishman arrived at the open French door first and took up a position along the left side. Gabriel went to the right and looked briefly down at the man who, a few seconds earlier, had stepped into the garden for a breath of fresh air. There was no need to check for a pulse; the .45-caliber round fired by Keller’s gun had entered the skull cleanly and exited in a mess. The man had never known what had hit him and probably had been dead before he fell. It was a decent way to depart this world, thought Gabriel. For a criminal. For a soldier. For anyone.

  Gabriel looked at Keller. Their poses were identical: one shoulder against the exterior of the villa, two hands on the gun, the barrel pointed at the ground. After a few seconds Keller gave a terse nod. Then, raising the HK to eye level, he rotated silently inside. Gabriel followed and covered the right side of the room while Keller saw to the left. There was no movement and no sound other than the television, where Jimmy Stewart was pulling Kim Novak from the waters of San Francisco Bay. The room smelled of spoiled food, stale tobacco, and spilled wine. Empty cardboard containers littered every surface. A month in Provence, thought Gabriel, Marseilles underworld style.

  Keller inched forward through the flickering light of the television, the HK extended, sweeping back and forth in a ninety-degree arc. Gabriel hovered a half step behind, his gun pointed in the opposite direction but moving in the same arc. They came to an archway separating the sitting room from the dining room. Gabriel pivoted inside, swiveled the gun in all directions, and then pivoted back to Keller’s side. At the entrance to the kitchen, he quickly repeated the movement. Both rooms were unoccupied, but both were piled high with soiled plates and cutlery. The squalor of the place made the back of Gabriel’s neck burn with anger. As a rule, captors who lived like pigs did not treat their hostages well.

  At last they came to the entrance hall. It was the one place in the villa that still bore any resemblance to the photographs Gabriel had seen at the offices of L’Immobiliere du Lubéron. The heavy timbered door with iron studs. The small decorative table. The two flights of limestone steps, one rising to the second level of the house, the other sinking into the basement. Both were in total darkness.