The English Assassin (39 page)

“If memory serves, the first two blows were yours.”

“I’ve never struck another man before. It probably hurt me more than it hurt you. Besides, I needed time.”

“Time for what?”

“To make the arrangements to get you out of here.”

Gabriel released the magazine into his palm and made certain the gun was loaded and not just another of Peterson’s deceptions.

“I understand Gessler has quite a collection,” said Peterson.

“You’ve never seen it?”

“No, I’ve never been invited.”

“Is it true? Is this place really a bank? No one can ever get inside?”

“Gabriel, this entire country is a bank.” Again Peterson reached into his pocket, and this time he produced a half-dozen tablets. “Here, take these. Something for the pain and a stimulant. You’re going to need it.”

Gabriel swallowed the pills in one gulp, then
rammed the magazine into the butt. “What kind of arrangements have you made?”

“I found your two friends. They were holed up in a guest house in the village. They’ll be waiting at the bottom of the mountain, at the edge of Gessler’s property, near the spot where we left them yesterday.”

Yesterday?
Had it only been one day? It seemed more like a year. A lifetime.

“There’s a single guard outside this door. You’ll have to take care of him first. Quietly. Can you manage that? Are you strong enough?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Follow the corridor to the right. At the end you’ll find a flight of stairs and at the top of the stairs a doorway. That will put you outside, on the grounds. From there you just have to make your way down the slope of the mountain to your friends.”

Through the guards and the Alsatians,
thought Gabriel.

“Leave Switzerland the way we came in yesterday. I’ll make sure the crossing is clear.”

“What will happen to you?”

“I’ll tell them that I came to see you one last time to try to convince you to tell me where the paintings were hidden. I’ll tell them that you overpowered me and escaped.”

“Will they believe you?”

“They might, or then again they may drop me into that crevasse that they’d reserved for you.”

“Come with me.”

“My wife, my children.” Then he added: “My country.”

“Why are you doing this? Why not let them kill me and be done with it?”

And then Peterson told him the story of what had
happened in his village during the war—the story of the Jews who had crossed into Switzerland from France in search of refuge only to be expelled across the border into the arms of the Gestapo.

“After my father’s death, I was going through some of the papers in his study, trying to put his affairs in order. I found a letter. It was from the federal police. A commendation. Do you know what the commendation was for? It was my father who had reported the presence of the Jews in our village. It was because of my father that they were sent back to the Germans and murdered. I don’t want any more Jewish blood on the hands of this family. I want you to leave this place alive.”

“When the storm hits, it might be unpleasant for you.”

“Storms have a way of punching themselves out against the mountain ranges of this country. They say that up on the Jungfrau the wind blows two hundred miles per hour. But the storms never seem to have much strength left when they reach Bern and Zurich. Here, let me help you up.”

Peterson pulled him to his feet.

“One in three?”

“If you’re lucky.”

Gabriel stood just inside the door. Peterson beat his fist on it twice. A moment later the bolts slid away, the door opened, and the guard entered the room. Gabriel stepped in front of him and, using every last bit of strength he could summon, rammed the barrel of the Beretta through the guard’s left temple.

P
ETERSON
felt the neck for a pulse. “Very impressive, Gabriel. Take his coat.”

“It has blood on it.”

“Do as I say. It will make them hesitate before shooting you, and you’ll need it for protection against the cold. Take his submachine gun too—just in case you need something more powerful than your Beretta.”

Peterson helped Gabriel remove the dead man’s jacket. He wiped the excess blood onto the floor and pulled it on. He hung the machine gun over his shoulder. The Beretta he kept in his right hand.

“Now me,” said Peterson. “Something convincing but not quite as irrevocable.”

Before Peterson could brace himself for the pain, Gabriel struck him with the butt of the Beretta high on the cheekbone, splitting flesh. Peterson momentarily lost his balance but stayed upright. He touched the wound with his fingertips, then looked at the blood.

“The blood of atonement, yes?”

“Something like that.”

“Go.”

NIDWALDEN, SWITZERLAND

T
HE COLD THAT GREETED
Gabriel as he stepped through the doorway at the top of the stairs was like another blow to the face. It was late afternoon, nightfall fast approaching, wind singing in the pines. His hands began to burn with the cold. He should have taken the dead man’s gloves.

He looked up and picked out the peak of the Jungfrau. A few brushstrokes of pale pink light lay high on its face, but the rest of the massif was blue and gray and entirely forbidding.
They say that up on the Jungfrau the wind blows two hundred miles per hour.

The doorway was concrete and steel, like the entrance to a secret military bunker. Gabriel wondered how many were scattered around Gessler’s estate, and what other wonders could be discovered by someone with access to them. He pushed those thoughts from his mind for now and concentrated on orienting himself. He was not fifty yards from the
pool house, on the back side, a few yards from the trees.

. . . make your way down the slope of the mountain . . .

He walked across the open ground, through knee-deep snow, and entered the trees. Somewhere a dog began to bark. The hounds of Gessler. He wondered how long it would be before another guard came to the cell and discovered the body. And how long Peterson could keep up the ruse that he’d been assaulted by a man who’d been beaten half to death.

It was dark in the trees, and as he groped his way forward, he thought of the night he’d crept through Rolfe’s villa in Zurich and discovered the photographs hidden in the false desk drawer.

Herr Hitler, I’d like you to meet Herr Rolfe. Herr Rolfe has agreed to do a few favors for us. Herr Rolfe is a collector, like you, mein Führer.

There was one advantage to the cold: after a few moments he could no longer feel his face. Here the snow was a few inches less deep, but each step was a new adventure: an outcropping of rock; a fallen tree limb; a hole left by some burrowing animal. Four times he lost his balance and fell, and each time it was harder to get up than the last. But he did get up, and he kept walking, down the fall line of the slope, down to the spot where Oded and Eli waited.

Gabriel came upon a small clearing where a guard stood watch. The guard was twenty yards away, his back slightly turned, so that Gabriel saw him in semi-profile. He didn’t trust himself to make the shot from that distance—not with his concussions and his swollen eyes and frozen hands—so he kept moving forward, hoping the dark would conceal his ragged appearance just long enough.

He managed a few steps before one of his footfalls snapped a tree limb. The guard pivoted and looked at Gabriel, uncertain what to do next. Gabriel kept moving forward, calmly and steadily, as though he were the next shift coming on duty. When he was three feet away he pulled the Beretta from his pocket and pointed it at the guard’s chest. The round exited the man’s back in a cloud of blood and tissue and polyester gossamer.

The gunshot echoed up the mountainside. Immediately a dog began to bark; then another; then a third. Lights came on up at the villa. Beyond the clearing was a narrow track, just wide enough for a small vehicle. Gabriel tried to run but could not. His muscles had neither the strength nor the coordination required to run down the slope of a snow-covered mountain. So he walked and barely managed that.

Ahead of him he sensed that the contour of the land was beginning to flatten out, as if Gessler’s mountain was meeting the valley floor. And then he saw the lights of the Volkswagen and two figures—mere shadows, Lavon and Oded, stomping their feet against the cold.

Keep moving! Walk!

From behind, he heard a dog bark, followed by the voice of a man. “Halt, you! Halt before I shoot!”

Judging from the volume, they were very close; thirty yards, no more. He looked down the mountain. Oded and Lavon had heard it too, because they were now scrambling up the road to meet him.

Gabriel kept walking.

“Halt, I say! Halt now, or I’ll shoot!”

He heard a rumble and turned around in time to see the Alsatian, released from the restraint of its lead,
charging toward him like an avalanche. Behind the dog was the guard, a submachine gun in his hands.

Gabriel hesitated a fraction of a second.
Who first? Dog or man?
Man had a gun, dog had jaws that could break his back. As the dog leapt through the air toward him, he raised the Beretta one-handed and fired past the beast toward his master. The shot struck him in the center of his chest and he collapsed onto the track.

Then the dog drove his head into Gabriel’s chest and knocked him to the ground. As he hit the frozen track, his right hand slammed to the ground and the Beretta fell from his grasp.

The dog went immediately for Gabriel’s throat. He raised his left arm over his face, and it took that instead. Gabriel screamed as the teeth tore through the protective layer of the jacket and imbedded themselves in the flesh of his forearm. The dog was snarling, thrashing his giant head about, trying to move his arm away so it could be rewarded with the soft flesh of his throat. Frantically, he beat the snowy ground with his right hand, searching for the lost Beretta.

The dog bit down harder, breaking bone.

Gabriel screamed in agony. The pain was more intense than anything Gessler’s thugs had inflicted on him. One last time he swept the ground with his hand. This time he found the grip of the Beretta.

With a vicious twist of its massive neck, the dog forced Gabriel’s arm to the side and lunged for his throat. Gabriel pressed the barrel of the gun against the dog’s ribs and fired three shots into its heart.

Gabriel pushed the dog away and got to his feet. There were shouts coming from the direction of the villa, and Gessler’s dogs were baying. He started
walking. The left sleeve of his jacket was in tatters and blood was streaming over his hand. After a moment he saw Eli Lavon running up the track to him, and he collapsed in his arms.

“Keep walking, Gabriel. Can you walk?”

“I can walk.”

“Oded, get ahold of him. My God, what have they done to you, Gabriel? What have they done?”

“I can walk, Eli. Let me walk.”

PORT NAVAS, CORNWALL

T
HE COTTAGE STOOD
above a narrow tidal creek, low and stout and solid as a ship, with a fine double door and white shuttered windows. Gabriel returned on a Monday. The painting, a fourteenth-century Netherlandish altarpiece, care of Isherwood Fine Arts, St. James’s, London, came on the Wednesday. It was entombed in a shipping crate of reinforced pine and borne up the narrow staircase to Gabriel’s studio by a pair of thick boys who smelled of their lunchtime beer. Gabriel chased away the smell by opening a window and a flask of pungent arcosolve.

He took his time uncrating the painting. Because of its age and fragile state, it had been shipped in not one crate but two—an inner crate that secured the painting structurally and an outer crate that cradled it in a stable environment. Finally, he removed the cushion of foam padding and the shroud of protective silicone paper and placed the piece on his easel.

It was the centerpiece of a triptych, approximately three feet in height and two feet in width, oil on three adjoining oak panels with vertical grain—almost certainly Baltic oak, the preferred wood of the Flemish masters. He made diagnostic notes on a small pad: severe convex warp, separation of the second and third panels, extensive losses and scarring.

And if it had been his body on the easel instead of the altarpiece? Fractured jaw, cracked right cheekbone, fractured left eye socket, chipped vertebrae, broken left radius caused by severe dog bite requiring prophylactic treatment of rabies shots. A hundred sutures to repair more than twenty cuts and severe lacerations of the face, residual swelling and disfigurement.

He wished he could do for his face what he was about to do for the painting. The doctors who had treated him in Tel Aviv had said only time could restore his natural appearance. Three months had passed, and he still could barely summon the courage to look at his face in the mirror. Besides, he knew that time was not the most loyal friend of a fifty-year-old face.