A Death in Vienna

echoed from the stucco and brickwork of the surrounding buildings and vibrated within his own ears, so that he could no longer hear the sound of the motorbike at his back. An image flashed before his eyes: his mother at the side of a Polish road with Erich Radek’s gun to her temple. Only then did he realize he was screaming in German. The language of his dreams. The language of his nightmares.
    The second assassin leveled the weapon, then lifted the visor of the helmet.
    Gabriel could hear the sound of his own name.
    “Get down! Get down!Gabriel! ”
    He realized it was the voice of Chiara.
    He threw himself to the street.
    Chiara’s shots sailed overhead and struck the oncomingmotorino. The bike veered out of control and slammed into the side of a building. The assassin catapulted over the handlebars and tumbled along the paving stones. The gun came to rest a few feet from Gabriel. He reached for it.
    “No, Gabriel! Leave it!Hurry! ”
    He looked up and saw Chiara holding out her hand to him. He climbed on the back of themotorino and clung childlike to her hips as the bike roared up the Corso toward the river.
    SHAMRON HAD Arule about safe flats: there was to be no physical contact between male and female agents. That evening, in an Office flat in the north of Rome, near a lazy bend in the Tiber, Gabriel and Chiara violated Shamron’s rule with an intensity born of the fear of death. Only afterward did Gabriel bother to ask Chiara how she had found him.
    “Shamron told me you were coming to Rome. He asked me to watch your back. I agreed, of course. I have a very personal interest in your continued survival.”
    Gabriel wondered how he had failed to notice he was being tailed by a five-foot-ten-inch Italian goddess, but then, Chiara Zolli was very good at her work.
    “I wanted to join you for lunch at Piperno,” she said mischievously. “I didn’t think it was a terribly good idea.”
    “How much do you know about the case?”
    “Only that my worst fears about Vienna turned out to be true. Why don’t you tell me the rest?”
    Which he did, beginning with his flight from Vienna and concluding with the information he had picked up earlier that night from Shimon Pazner.
    “So who sent that man to Rome to kill you?”
    “I think it’s safe to assume it was the same person who engineered the murder of Max Klein.”
    “How did they find you here?”
    Gabriel had been asking himself that same question. His suspicions fell upon the rosy-cheeked Austrian rector of the Anima, Bishop Theodor Drexler.
    “So where are we going next?” Chiara asked.
    “We?”
    “Shamron told me to watch your back. You want me to disobey a direct order from theMemuneh ?”
    “He told you to watch me in Rome.”
    “It was an open-ended assignment,” she replied, her tone defiant.
    Gabriel lay there for a moment, stroking her hair. Truth was, he could use a traveling companion and a second pair of eyes in the field. Given the obvious risks involved, he would have preferred someone other than the woman he loved. But then, she had proven herself a valuable partner.
    There was a secure telephone on the bedside table. He dialed Jerusalem and woke Moshe Rivlin from a heavy sleep. Rivlin gave him the name of a man in Buenos Aires, along with a telephone number and an address in thebarrio San Telmo. Then Gabriel called Aerolineas Argentinas and booked two business-class seats on a flight the following evening. He hung up the receiver. Chiara rested her cheek against his chest.
    “You were shouting something back there in that alley when you were running toward me,” she said. “Do you remember what you were saying?”
    He couldn’t. It was as if he had awakened unable to recall the dreams that disturbed his sleep.
    “You were calling out to her,” Chiara said.
    “Who?”
    “Your mother.”
    He remembered the image that had flashed before his eyes during that mind-bending flight from the man on themotorino. He supposed it was indeed possible he had been calling out to his mother. Since reading her testimony he had been thinking of little else.
    “Are you sure it was Erich Radek who murdered those poor girls in Poland?”
    “As sure as onecan be sixty years after the fact.”
    “And if Ludwig Vogel is actually Erich Radek?”
    Gabriel reached up and switched off the lamp.
    23
    ROME
    THE VIA DELLAPace was deserted. The Clockmaker stopped at the gates of the Anima and shut down the engine of themotorino. He reached out, his