The English Assassin

Rütli and Swiss security-service officers loyal to Peterson. Peterson knew that Gabriel went to Portugal a week after Rolfe’s funeral to see Anna Rolfe, and he knew that they traveled to Zurich together and visited the Rolfe villa.
    From that moment on, Gabriel is under surveillance: Rome, Paris, London, Lyons. The Council retains the services of a professional assassin. In Paris, he kills Müller and destroys his gallery. In Lyons, he kills Emil Jacobi.
    “Who were the men waiting for me that night at Rolfe’s villa?” Gabriel asked.
    “They worked for the Council. We hired a professional to handle things outside our borders.” Peterson paused. “You killed them both, by the way. It was a very impressive performance. And then we lost track of you for thirty-six hours.”
    Vienna, thought Gabriel. His meeting with Lavon. His confrontation with Anna about her father’s past. Just as Gabriel had suspected, Peterson picks up their trail the next day on the Bahnhofstrasse. After discovering Anna Rolfe’s car abandoned at the German border, the Council presses the panic button. Gabriel Allon and Anna Rolfe are to be hunted down and murdered by the professional at the first opportunity. It was supposed to happen in Venice. . . .
     
    PETERSON’Shead slumped toward the tabletop as the effects of the stimulants subsided. Peterson needed sleep—natural sleep, not the kind that came from a syringe. Gabriel had only one question left, and he needed an answer before Peterson could be carried off and handcuffed to a bed. By the time he asked it, Peterson had made a pillow of his hands and was resting, facedown, on the table. “The paintings,” Gabriel repeated softly. “Where are the paintings?” Peterson managed only two words before he slid into unconsciousness.
    Otto Gessler.

43
    MALLES VENOSTA, ITALY
     
    O NLYGERHARDTPETERSONslept that night. Eli Lavon awakened his girl in Vienna and dispatched her on a 2A .M. run to his office in the Jewish Quarter to scour his dusty archives. One hour later, the results of her search rattled off the fax machine, so meager they could have been written on the back of a Viennese postcard. Research Section in Tel Aviv contributed its own slender and thoroughly unhelpful volume, while Oded roamed the dubious corners of the Internet in a search for cybergossip.
    Otto Gessler was a ghost. A rumor. Finding the truth about him, said Lavon, was like trying to catch fog in a bottle. His age was anyone’s guess. His date of birth was unknown, as was the place. There were no photographs. He lived nowhere and everywhere, had no parents and no children. “He’ll probably never die,” Lavon said, rubbing his eyes with bewilderment. “One day, when his time comes, he’s just going to disappear.”

    Of Gessler’s business affairs, little was known and much was suspected. He was thought to have a controlling interest in a number of private banks, trust companies, and industrial concerns. Which private banks, which trust companies, and which industrial concerns no one knew, because Otto Gessler operated only through front companies and corporate cutouts. When Otto Gessler did a deal, he left no physical evidence—no fingerprints, no footprints, no DNA—and his books were sealed tighter than a sarcophagus.
    Over the years, his name had cropped up in connection with a number of money-laundering and trading scandals. He was rumored to have cornered commodities markets, sold guns and butter to dictators in violation of international sanctions, turned drug profits into respectable real-estate holdings. But the leather glove of law enforcement had never touched Otto Gessler. Thanks to a legion of lawyers spread from New York to London to Zurich, Otto Gessler had paid not one centime in fines and served not one day in jail.
    Oded did discover one interesting anecdote buried in a highly speculative American magazine profile. Several years after the war, Gessler acquired a company which had manufactured arms for the Wehrmacht. In a warehouse outside Lucerne, he had discovered five thousand artillery pieces that had been stranded in Switzerland after the collapse of the Third Reich. Unwilling to allow unsold inventory to remain on his books, Gessler went in search of a buyer. He found one in a rebellious corner of Asia. The Nazi artillery pieces helped topple a colonial ruler, and Gessler earned twice the profit the guns would have fetched in Berlin.
    As the sun rose over the row of