The English Assassin

I want to show you.”
    Back up the elevator, another walk through the darkened villa to a windowless chamber of winking electronics and video monitors. Gabriel could see the villa from every angle: the street, the entrance, the gardens front and back.
    “In addition to the security cameras, every inch of the property is covered by motion detectors,” Anna said. “The windows and doors all have trip wires and alarms. My father didn’t employ a full-time security guard, but the house was impenetrable and he could summon the police in a matter of seconds in the event of an intruder.”
    “So what happened on the night of the murder?”
    “The system failed inexplicably.”
    “How convenient.”
    She sat down in front of a computer terminal. “There’s a separate system for the room downstairs. It’s activated when the outer door opens. The time of entry is automatically logged, and inside the room two digital cameras begin recording still images every three seconds.”
    She typed in a few characters on the keyboard, moved the mouse, clicked. “This is when we entered the room, twelve forty-nine a.m., and here we are inside.”
    Gabriel leaned over her shoulder and peered into the computer monitor. A grainy color image of their visit appeared on the screen and then dissolved, only to be replaced by another. Anna worked the mouse again. A directory appeared.
    “This is the master list of visits to that room for the past three months. As you can see, my father spent a great deal of time with the collection. He came down at least once a day, sometimes twice.” She touched the screen with her forefinger. “Here’s his last visit, shortly after midnight, the morning he was murdered. The security system shows no other entries after that.”
    “Did the police give you an estimate of when they thought he was killed?”
    “They said around threeA .M.”
    “So it stands to reason that the same people who killed your father also took the paintings and that it probably happened around three o’clock in the morning, six hours before I arrived at the villa.”
    “Yes, that’s right.”
    Gabriel pointed to the last entry on the screen. “Let me see that one.”
     
    AMOMENT later, the images flickered onto the monitor. The camera angles did not reveal all the paintings, but Gabriel could see enough to realize that it was a remarkable collection. Manet, Bonnard, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne, Pissarro, Degas, a nude by Renoir, a canal landscape by van Gogh, two street scenes by Monet, a large portrait of a woman painted by Picasso during his blue period. And seated in the center of the room, in a straight-backed wing chair, was an old man, gazing at his collection one last time before his death.

11
    ZURICH
     
    F OUR HOURS LATER, Gerhardt Peterson was sitting alone in his office, a grotto of pale Scandinavian wood overlooking the grimy inner courtyard of blackened brick. His computer screen was blank, his morning correspondence unopened, his morning coffee untouched, his outer door uncustomarily locked. A cigarette slowly turned to dust in his ashtray. Peterson did not notice. His gaze was downward, toward the three photographs that lay side by side on his leather blotter. Allon and Anna Rolfe, leaving the villa. Allon and Anna Rolfe, getting into a Mercedes sedan. Allon and Anna Rolfe, driving away. Finally he stirred, as if awakened from an unpleasant daydream, and fed the photographs into his shredder, one by one, watching with particular satisfaction as they turned to confetti. Then he picked up the telephone, dialed a number from memory, and waited for an answer. Twenty minutes later, his appointments for the rest of the day canceled, he climbed into his Mercedes sedan and raced down the shore of the Zürichsee toward Herr Gessler’s mountain chalet.

12
    CORSICA
     
    T HE OLD signadora lived in a crooked house in the village, not far from the church. She greeted the Englishman as always, with a worried smile and a hand on his cheek. She wore a heavy black dress with an embroidered neck. Her skin was the color of flour, her white hair was pulled back and held in place by metal pins. Funny how the marks of ethnicity and national origin are diminished by time, thought the Englishman. If it wasn’t for her Corsican language and mystical Catholic ways she might have been his old Auntie Beatrice from Ipswich. “The evil has returned, my son,” she whispered, stroking his cheek. “I can see it in your eyes. Sit