The English Assassin

him was a fleshy, decadent-looking man in civilian dress with dueling scars on his cheeks. Gabriel did not recognize him.
    He turned his attention to the second photograph. The setting was a terrace in an Alpine home—Rolfe, standing at the balustrade, admiring the magnificent view, accompanied by two men in uniform. Gabriel recognized them both.
    One was Heinrich Himmler. The other was Adolf Hitler.
     
    GABRIELslipped the photographs and the documents back into the envelope. It was legal-sized, too large to fit into a pocket, so he shoved it down the front of his trousers and secured it by zipping his leather jacket. He looked at the desk. Nothing to be done about the drawer; it was broken to bits. He pushed the fragments under the seating compartment with his foot and concealed them with Rolfe’s chair. The Beretta was lying on Rolfe’s leather blotter. He dropped it into his pocket and turned to leave.
    He navigated by the beam of the weak penlight. Once again, he had the sensation of experiencing the room a fragment at a time, this time in reverse order. With each movement of the light, a new piece of information: the oak writing table, the eighteenth-century armchairs, a leather ottoman . . .
    A man standing in the doorway, with a gun pointed at Gabriel’s heart.

25
    ZURICH
     
    G ABRIEL TOSSEDthe flashlight across the room, drew his Beretta, and dropped to the floor. The man in the doorway fired. The gun was silenced, but the muzzle flash was visible in the darkness. The shot ripped through the air over Gabriel’s head and shattered the window behind Rolfe’s desk. Before the man could shoot again, Gabriel rose onto one knee and fired in the direction of the muzzle flash. The shots struck their target—Gabriel knew this because he could hear the rounds tearing through tissue and shattering bone. He got to his feet and ran forward, firing as he went, the way he had been trained at the Academy. The way he had done it so many times before. When he was standing over the man, he reached down, placed the barrel into his ear, and fired one last time.
    The body convulsed, then went still.
    Gabriel knelt and searched the dead man’s pockets: no billfold, no keys, no money. A Glock nine-millimeter lay on the floor a few feet from the body. Gabriel slipped it into his pocket and went into the corridor.
    Next to the center stairwell was an alcove with a set of tall windows overlooking the street. Gabriel looked down and saw two men pounding up the front steps. He ran across the corridor to the windows overlooking the rear garden. Outside was another man, gun drawn, feet apart, talking on a handheld radio.
    As Gabriel descended the curving staircase, he ejected the spent cartridge from his Beretta and inserted the backup. He retraced the route Anna had taken the night she showed him the secret vault: through the great dining room, through the kitchen, down the back staircase, through the wine cellar, into the cutting room.
    He came to a doorway with a window of paned glass that led into the garden. Gabriel pushed open the door a few inches and peered out. The man with the radio and the gun was prowling the snowy terrace. The other team had entered the house—Gabriel could hear the trample of feet on the first floor above him.
    He stepped outside and trotted across the garden directly toward the man with the gun. In rapid German, he said: “You there! Did you see which way that jackass went?” The man looked at him in utter confusion. Gabriel kept moving forward. “What’s wrong with you, man? Are you deaf? Answer me!”
    When the man lifted his radio to his mouth, Gabriel’s arm swung up, and he started firing. Five shots, the last into his chest from three feet away.
    Gabriel looked up toward the house. He could see flashlight beams playing over the drawn curtains. Then the curtains parted and a face appeared. A shout. Hammering on glass.

    Gabriel turned and sprinted across the garden until he came to a wall—seven feet in height, he guessed, with a row of wrought-iron spikes across the top. Glancing over his shoulder, he spotted the two men from the house. One was kneeling over the dead man, the other scanning the garden by the beam of a powerful flashlight.
    Gabriel jumped up and grabbed hold of the metal spikes at the top of the wall. The beam of light fell on him, and someone shouted in German. He pulled himself up, flailing his feet against the wall. A shot struck the stucco, then another. Gabriel