The English Assassin

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.”

47
    NIDWALDEN, SWITZERLAND
     
    T HE COLD THAT GREETEDGabriel 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