The English Assassin

against his shoulder and whispered, “Now I think I’m going to be sick.” Gabriel squeezed her hand.
     
    ONthe other side of the border another car was waiting, a dark-blue Ford Fiesta with Munich registration. Ari Shamron’s truck driver dropped them and continued on his synthetic journey to nowhere. Gabriel loaded the safe-deposit boxes into the trunk and started driving—the E41 to Stuttgart, the E52 to Karlsruhe, the E35 to Frankfurt. Once during the night he stopped to telephone Tel Aviv on an emergency line, and he spoke briefly with Shamron.
    At 2A .M. they arrived in the Dutch market town of Delft, a few miles inland from the coast. Gabriel could drive no farther. His eyes burned, his ears were ringing with exhaustion. In eight hours, a ferry would leave from Hoek van Holland for the English port of Harwich, and Gabriel and Anna would be on it, but for now he needed a bed and a few hours of rest, so they drove through the streets of the old town looking for a hotel.
    He found one, on the Vondelstraat, within sight of the spire of the Nieuwe Kerk. Anna handled the formalities at the front desk while Gabriel waited in the tiny parlor with the two safe-deposit boxes. A moment later, they were escorted up a narrow staircase to an overheated room with a peaked ceiling and a gabled window, which Gabriel immediately opened.

    He placed the boxes in the closet; then he pulled off his shoes and stretched out on the bed. Anna slipped into the bathroom, and a moment later Gabriel heard the comforting sound of water splashing against enamel. The cold night air blew through the open window. Scented with the North Sea, it caressed his face. He permitted himself to close his eyes.
    A few minutes later Anna came out of the bathroom. A burst of light announced her arrival; then she reached out and threw the wall switch, and the room was in darkness again, except for the weak glow of streetlamps seeping through the window.
    “Are you awake?”
    “No.”
    “Aren’t you going to sleep on the floor, the way you did in Vienna?”
    “I can’t move.”
    She lifted the blanket and crawled into bed next to him.
    Gabriel said, “How did you know the password was ‘adagio’?”
    “Albinoni’s “Adagio” was one of the first pieces I learned to play. For some reason, it remained my father’s favorite.” Her lighter flared in the darkness. “My father wanted forgiveness for his sins. He wanted absolution. He was willing to turn to you for that but not to me. Why didn’t my father ask me for forgiveness?”
    “He probably didn’t think you’d give it to him.”
    “It sounds as though you speak from experience. Has your wife ever forgiven you?”
    “No, I don’t think she has.”
    “And what about you? Have you ever forgiven yourself?”

    “I wouldn’t call it forgiveness.”
    “What would you call it?”
    “Accommodation. I’ve reached accommodation with myself.”
    “My father died without absolution. He probably deserved that. But I want to finish what he set out to do. I want to get those paintings back and send them to Israel.”
    “So do I.”
    “How?”
    “Go to sleep, Anna.”
    Which she did. Gabriel lay awake, waiting for the dawn, listening to the gulls on the canal and the steady rhythm of Anna’s breathing. No demons tonight, no nightmares—the guiltless sleep of a child. Gabriel did not join her. He wasn’t ready to sleep yet. When the paintings were locked away in Julian Isherwood’s vault—then he would sleep.

Part Three

32
    NIDWALDEN, SWITZERLAND
     
    O N THE EVEof the Second World War, General Henri Guisan, the commander in chief of Switzerland’s armed forces, announced a desperate plan to deal with an invasion by the overwhelmingly superior forces of Nazi Germany. If the Germans come, Guisan said, the Swiss Army would withdraw to the natural fortress of the Alpine Redoubt and blow up the tunnels. And there they would fight, in the deep valleys and on the high mountain ice fields, to the last man. It had not come to that, of course. Hitler realized early in the war that a neutral Switzerland would be more valuable to him than a Switzerland in chains and under occupation. Still, the general’s heroic strategy for dealing with the threat of invasion lives on in the imagination of the Swiss.
    Indeed, it was on Gerhardt Peterson’s mind the following afternoon as he skirted Lucerne and the Alps loomed before him, shrouded in cloud. Peterson could feel his heart beat faster as