The English Assassin (6 page)

“Go ask them.”

“I don’t want them. I want you.”

“Why me?”

“Because you have gifts. You have languages. You have a clear head. You don’t drink, and you don’t smoke hash. You’re not a crazy who’s going to go off half-cocked.”

And because you have the emotional coldness of a killer,
Shamron thought, although he didn’t say these words to Gabriel then. Instead, he told him a story, the story of a young intelligence officer who had been chosen for a special mission because he had a gift, an unusually powerful grip for so small a man. The story of a night in a Buenos Aires suburb, when this young intelligence officer had seen a man waiting at a bus stop.
Waiting like an ordinary man, Gabriel. An ordinary pathetic little man.
And how this young intelligence officer had leapt from a car and grabbed the man by the throat and how he had sat on him as the car drove away and how he had smelled the stink of fear on his breath. The same stink the Jews had emitted as this pathetic little man sent them off to the gas chambers. And the story worked, as Shamron had known it would.
Because Gabriel was the only son of two Auschwitz survivors, and their scars were his.

He was suddenly very tired. Imagine, all those years, all those killings, and now he was behind bars for the first time, for a murder he did not commit.
Thou shalt not get caught!
Shamron’s Eleventh Commandment.
Thou shalt do anything to avoid being arrested. Thou shalt shed the blood of innocents if necessary.
No, thought Gabriel. Thou shalt not shed innocent blood.

He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to sleep but it was no good: Peterson’s incessant light. The lights were surely burning on King Saul Boulevard too. And a call would go out.
Don’t wake him,
thought Gabriel,
because I don’t ever want to see his lying face again. Let him sleep. Let the old man sleep.

I
T
was a few minutes after 8
A
.
M
. when Peterson entered Gabriel’s cell. Gabriel knew this not because Peterson bothered to tell him but because he managed a glance at the face of Peterson’s big diver’s watch as Peterson tipped coffee into his mouth.

“I’ve spoken to your chief.”

He paused to see if his words provoked any response, but Gabriel remained silent. His position was that he was an art restorer, nothing more, and that Herr Peterson was suffering from a case of temporary insanity.

“He did me the professional courtesy of not trying to lie his way out of this situation. I appreciate the way he handled things. But it seems Bern has no appetite to pursue this matter further.”

“Which matter is that?”

“The matter of your involvement in the murder of Ali Hamidi,” Peterson said coldly. Gabriel had the
impression he was struggling to control violent thoughts. “Since prosecuting you for your role in the Rolfe affair would inevitably reveal your sordid past, we have no choice but to drop charges against you in that matter as well.”

Peterson clearly disagreed with the decision of his masters in Bern.

“Your government has assured us that you are no longer a member of any branch of Israeli intelligence and that you did not come to Zurich in any
official
capacity. My government has chosen to accept these assurances at face value. It has no stomach for allowing Switzerland to become a stage for the Israelis and the Palestinians to relive the horrors of the past.”

“When do I get to leave?”

“A representative of your government will collect you.”

“I’d like to change my clothes. May I have my suitcase?”

“No.”

Peterson stood up, straightened his tie, and smoothed his hair. Gabriel thought it was an oddly intimate thing for one man to do in front of another. Then he walked to the door, knocked once, and waited for the guard to unlock it.

“I don’t like murderers, Mr. Allon. Especially when they kill for a government. One of the conditions of your release is that you never set foot in Switzerland again. If you come back here, I’ll see to it that you never leave.”

The door opened. Peterson started to leave, then turned and faced Gabriel.

“It’s a shame about what happened to your wife and son in Vienna. It must be very hard living with a
memory like that. I suppose sometimes you wish it had been you in the car instead of them. Good day, Mr. Allon.”

I
T
was late afternoon by the time Peterson finally saw fit to release him. Sergeant-Major Baer escorted Gabriel from his holding cell, performing this task silently, as though Gabriel was bound for the gallows instead of freedom. Baer surrendered Gabriel’s suitcase, his restoration supplies, and a thick honey-colored envelope containing his personal effects. Gabriel spent a long moment taking careful inventory of his things. Baer looked at his watch as if pressing matters were tugging at him. The clothing in Gabriel’s suitcase had been dumped, searched, and stuffed haphazardly back into place. Someone had spilled a flask of arcosolve in his case. Baer tilted his head—
Sorry, dear man, but these things happen when one bumps up against police officers.

Outside, in the misty courtyard, stood a black Mercedes sedan surrounded by a half-dozen uniformed officers. In the windows of the surrounding buildings stood policemen and secretaries come to see the Israeli assassin led away. As Gabriel approached the car, the rear door opened and a cloud of cigarette smoke billowed forth. A glimpse into the shadowed backseat established the source.

He stopped in his tracks, a move that seemed to take Baer completely by surprise. Then, reluctantly, he started walking again and climbed into the backseat. Baer closed the door, and the car immediately pulled away, the tires slipping over the wet cobblestones. Shamron didn’t look at him. Shamron was gazing out the window, his eyes on the next battlefield, his thoughts on the next campaign.

ZURICH

T
O GET TO
Kloten Airport it was necessary to make the ascent up the Zürichberg one more time. As they breasted the summit, the graceful villas receded and they entered a river flatland scarred by ugly modular strip malls. They moved slowly along a clogged two-lane commuter road as the afternoon sun tried to fight its way out of the clouds. A car was following them. The man on the passenger side could have been Peterson.

Ari Shamron had come to Zurich in an official capacity, but in dress and manner he had assumed the identity of Herr Heller, the cover he used for his frequent European travels. Herr Rudolf Heller of Heller Enterprises, Ltd., an international venture capital firm with offices in London, Paris, Berlin, Bern, and Nassau. His multitude of critics might have said that Heller Enterprises specialized in murder and mayhem, blackmail and betrayal. Heller Enterprises was an Old
Economy firm, the critics said. What King Saul Boulevard needed to shake off its long winter of despair was a New Economy chief for the New Economy world. But Herr Heller clung to the keys of the executive suite with one of his patented vise grips, and few in Israel, prime ministers included, could muster the courage to wrest them away from him.

To his brotherhood of devoted acolytes, Shamron was a legend. Once Gabriel had been among them. But Shamron was also a liar, an unrepentant, unreconstructed liar. He lied as a matter of course, lied because he knew no other way, and he had lied to Gabriel time and time again. For a time their relationship had been like that of a father and a son. But the father became like a man who gambles or drinks or sleeps with many women and is forced to lie to his children, and now Gabriel hated him the way only a son can hate his father.

“What are you doing here? Why didn’t you just send someone from Bern station to pick me up?”

“Because you’re too important to entrust to someone from the station.” Shamron lit another one of his vile Turkish cigarettes and violently snapped the lighter closed. “Besides, Herr Peterson and his friends from the Foreign Ministry made my appearance here a condition of your release. The Swiss love to yell at me when one of our agents gets in trouble. I’m not sure why. I suppose it reinforces their superiority complex—makes them feel better for their past sins.”

“Who’s Peterson?”

“
Gerhardt
Peterson works for the Division of Analysis and Protection.”

“What the hell is that?”

“The new name for Switzerland’s internal security service. It has responsibility for national security
matters, counterintelligence, and investigating Swiss citizens suspected of treason. Peterson is the number-two man in the division. He oversees all operations.”

“How did you convince him to let me go?”

“I played the subservient Jew. I gave them the usual promises that we would not operate on Swiss soil without first consulting Herr Peterson and his superiors in the Swiss security service. I also told them about a certain Swiss arms-maker who’s flogging bomb triggers to terrorists on the open market. I suggested that they see to the situation themselves before someone takes matters into their own hands.”

“You always have an ace in the hole.”

“It’s been my experience that one can never be too prepared.”

“I thought your term was over.”

“It was supposed to end six months ago, but the prime minister asked me to stay on. Given the current situation in the territories, we both agreed that now was not the time for a change of leadership at King Saul Boulevard.”

Shamron had probably engineered the uprising himself, thought Gabriel. What better way to make himself indispensable? No, that was beyond even Shamron.

“My offer still stands.”

“Which offer is that?”

“Deputy director for operations.”

“No, thank you.”

Shamron shrugged. “Tell me what happened. I want to hear it all, from beginning to end.”

Gabriel so mistrusted Shamron that he considered giving him an abridged account of the affair, based on the theory that the less Shamron knew about anything, the better. But at least it would give them something
new to talk about instead of refighting old wars, so Gabriel told him everything, starting with his arrival on the overnight train from Paris and ending with his arrest and interrogation. Shamron looked out the window as Gabriel spoke, turning over his lighter in his fingers: clockwise, counterclockwise, clockwise, counterclockwise . . .

“Did you see the body?”

“Very professional, one shot through the eye. He was probably dead before he hit the ground. A coup de grâce wasn’t necessary.”

“Did the police ever hit you?”

“No.”

Shamron seemed disappointed by this.

Gabriel said, “Peterson told me the case was dropped because of pressure from Bern.”

“Perhaps, but there was no way Peterson was ever going to hang the Ali Hamidi job on you. Prosecuting anyone on a twenty-five-year-old murder is hard enough. Prosecuting a professional—” He shrugged his shoulders, as if to say such things are just not done. “The Hamidi job was a work of art. No witnesses, no evidence.”

The movie-star-handsome face of Ali Abdel Hamidi flashed in Gabriel’s memory. Within the corridors of King Saul Boulevard, the amorous Palestinian has been known as the Swordsman of Allah. Writer of plays that graced no stage, seducer and manipulator of foolish young women.
Would you mind delivering this package to this address for me? You’re flying to Tel Aviv? Would you mind taking a package to a friend?
The packages would inevitably be filled with explosives, and his lovers would be blown to bits along with anyone else who happened to be nearby. One night in Zurich,
Hamidi met a university student named Trude in a bar in the Niederdorf section. When the girl suggested they go back to her flat, Hamidi agreed. Five minutes later, she led him into the narrow alley where Gabriel was waiting with a .22-caliber Beretta. Even now, Gabriel could hear the sound of bullets tearing into Hamidi’s body.

“I suppose I should thank you for getting me out.”

“A show of gratitude isn’t necessary. In fact, I’m afraid I owe you an apology.”

“An apology? Whatever for?”

“Because if it wasn’t for me, you would have never been at Augustus Rolfe’s villa in the first place.”

R
AMI
, Shamron’s ever-present personal bodyguard, was behind the wheel of the car. Shamron told him to drive in circles at Kloten. For twenty minutes Gabriel watched the same parade of airline signs and departure gates marching past his window. In his mind he was seeing something else: flash frames of past operations, old colleagues and old enemies. His palms were damp, his heart was beating faster.
Shamron.
He had done it again.

“Rolfe sent a message to us through our embassy,” Shamron began. “He wanted to meet with someone from the Office. He didn’t say why, but when a man like Augustus Rolfe wants to talk, we usually try to accommodate him. He wanted the meeting to be handled with discretion. I looked into Rolfe’s background and discovered he was an art collector. Naturally, I thought you were the perfect man for the job, so I arranged for you to be hired to clean one of his paintings. A Rubens, if I’m not mistaken.”