The English Assassin (15 page)

“The deal changed.”

“And if I refuse?”

“You’ll have to get your package somewhere else. If you do that, I might be tempted to call one of our friends on the police force, one of the ones we keep in wine and whores. I might tell this friend that you’re in town working.”

“Fine, I’ll pay your new price, but after I use this device, I’m going to place an anonymous call to the Paris police and tell them who gave it to me. Thanks to your stupidity, I’ll even be able to tell them where I got it. They’ll raid the place, you’ll be arrested, and your employers will take the rest of your fingers.”

Debré was nervous now, eyes wide, licking his lips, the gun trembling in his left hand. He was used to people reacting with fear when he made threats. He didn’t often deal with someone like the Englishman.

“All right, you win,” said Debré. “We go back to the original price. One hundred thousand francs. Take the damned thing and get out of here.”

The Englishman decided to push him some more. “How will I get back to Paris?”

“That’s your problem.”

“It’s a long ride. The taxi fare will be expensive.” He reached out and picked up the envelope. “Probably about one hundred thousand francs.”

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m taking the device and my money. If you try to stop me, I’ll tell the police about your warehouse, and this time your boss in Marseilles certainly won’t stop with your hand.”

Debré raised the gun. The Englishman had let the game go on long enough. Time to end things. His training took over. He grabbed Debré’s arm in a lightning-fast movement that caught the Frenchman off-guard. He twisted the arm violently, breaking it in several places. Debré screamed in agony, and the gun clattered to the warehouse floor.

Debré’s partner made his move. The Englishman calculated he wouldn’t fire his weapon because of Debré’s proximity, which left only one option: to try to disable the Englishman with a blow to the back of the head. The Englishman ducked, and the punch sailed over his head. Then he grabbed Debré’s gun and came up firing. Two shots struck the big man in the chest. He fell to the floor, blood pumping between his fingers. The Englishman fired two more rounds into his skull.

Debré was leaning against the hood of the car, clutching his arm, utterly defeated. “Take the damned money! Take the package! Just leave here!”

“You shouldn’t have tried to cross me, Pascal.”

“You’re right. Just take everything and leave.”

“You were right about one thing,” the Englishman said as the heavy trench knife with the serrated blade slipped from his forearm sheath into his palm. A moment later Pascal Debré was lying on the floor next to
his partner, his face white as a sheet, his throat slashed nearly to the spine.

T
HE
keys 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 old
signadora
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.

PARIS

G
ABRIEL DECIDED
it 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, bodies, 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.

PARIS

P
ARIS HAD SUFFERED
its 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.