The English Assassin

into his villa on the Zürichberg and put a bullet in his head.”
    Jacobi closed the file and looked at Gabriel.
    “Would you care to pick up the story, Mr. Allon?”
     
    WHENGabriel was finished, Professor Jacobi spent a long time polishing his spectacles on the fat end of his tie. Then he shoved them back onto his forehead and poured himself another cup of coffee. “It sounds as though you’ve run up against the great conspiracy of silence.”
    “What do you mean by that?”
    “When you’re dealing with Switzerland, Mr. Allon, it’s best to keep one thing in mind. Switzerland is not a real country. It’s a business, and it’s run like a business. It’s a business that is constantly in a defensive posture. It’s been that way for seven hundred years.”
    “What does that have to do with Rolfe’s murder?”
    “There are people in Switzerland who stand to lose a great deal if the sins of the past are exposed and the sewers of the Bahnhofstrasse are given the thorough flushing they so desperately need. These people are an invisible government, and are not to be taken lightly, which is why I live here instead of Lausanne. If you choose to pursue this matter, I suggest you watch your back.”
    Ten minutes later Gabriel was walking down the stairs with his copy of The Myth tucked beneath his arm. He paused in the foyer for a moment to open the cover and read the words the professor had scrawled on the title page.
    Beware the gnomes of Zurich—Emil Jacobi.
     

    THATimage of Gabriel was captured by the man with a long-range digital camera standing in the window of the apartment house on the opposite side of the street. One hour earlier he had also snapped a photograph of Gabriel’s arrival. The pictures were not necessary, just a professional touch. Allon’s entire conversation with Emil Jacobi had been picked up by the pair of sensitive transmitters the man had planted in the professor’s apartment six months earlier. As Allon walked away, the surveillance artist fired off several more photographs. Then he sat down in front of his playback deck and listened to the tapes. After thirty minutes of steady work, he had completed a thorough transcript of the encounter. He spent ten more minutes checking the transcription for accuracy, then he encrypted the report and sent it via secure e-mail to Zurich, along with the photographs of Allon.
    Thirty seconds after that, the information appeared on the computer screen of Gerhardt Peterson, who immediately picked up his telephone to request an urgent meeting with Herr Gessler. Gerhardt Peterson did not like Emil Jacobi, and neither did Herr Gessler. Jacobi’s one-man crusade against the financial oligarchy of Switzerland had become tiresome and costly. Both men agreed that it was time to deal with the meddlesome little professor.
    The following morning, before leaving his flat for the office, Gerhardt Peterson made a telephone call from the privacy of his study. It lasted no more than two minutes. The fate of Emil Jacobi, the guilty conscience of Switzerland, had been sealed by a financial transaction, the transfer of two hundred thousand dollars into a numbered account in Geneva controlled by Anton Orsati. Gerhardt Peterson found that very fitting indeed.

22
    COSTA DE PRATA, PORTUGAL
     
    W HEN GABRIEL ARRIVEDat Anna Rolfe’s villa the following morning, he was pleased to see it being guarded by at least four men: one at the gate, a second at the base of the vineyards, a third on the tree line, and a fourth perched on the hilltop. Shamron had sent Rami, his taciturn personal bodyguard, to supervise the detail. He greeted Gabriel in the drive. When Gabriel asked how Anna was dealing with the team, Rami rolled his eyes— You’ll see soon enough.
    He entered the villa and followed the sound of Anna’s violin up the staircase. Then he knocked on the door of her practice room and entered without waiting for permission. She spun round and berated him for interrupting her, then screamed at him for turning her home into an armed camp. As her tirade intensified, Gabriel looked down and fingered his bandages. A trickle of fresh blood had seeped through. Anna noticed this too. Immediately she fell silent and gently led him to her bedroom to change his dressings. He couldn’t help but look at her while she attended to him. The skin at the base of her neck was damp; the violin strings had left tiny valleys in the fingertips of her left hand. She was more beautiful