The English Assassin

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.”

Part Four
THREE MONTHS
LATER

48
    PORT NAVAS, CORNWALL
     
    T HE COTTAGE STOODabove 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.
     
    FORthe next week and a half he did nothing but read. His personal collection contained several excellent volumes on Rogier, and Julian had been good enough to send along two splendid books of his own, both of which happened to be in German. He spread them across his worktable and perched atop a tall hard stool, his back