The English Girl: A Novel

walk.”
    “So we’ll carry her,” said Keller. “It won’t be the first time I’ve carried someone off the battlefield.”
    Gabriel looked at the woman in the tan raincoat staring into space, then at the flickering light of the votive candles.
    “Who do you suppose he is?” he asked after a moment.
    “Who?”
    “Paul.”
    “I don’t know,” said Keller, rising. “But if I ever see him, he’s dead.”
    A fter leaving the church, Gabriel returned to the hotel and informed management he would be checking out. It was nothing serious, he assured them—a small crisis at home that only he, the peerless Herr Johannes Klemp of Munich, could disentangle. Management smiled regretfully but privately was pleased to see him go. The chambermaids had unanimously declared him the most annoying guest of the season, and Mafuz, the chief bellman, secretly wished him dead.
    It was Mafuz, standing pillar-like at his post by the front door, who saw him gratefully into the night. He rode through the streets of the town for several minutes to make certain he was not being followed. Then, with his headlamp doused, he made his way to the narrow dirt-and-gravel track running along the rim of the valley with three villas. One of the villas, the one in the east, was illuminated as if for a special occasion. Keller was standing amid a coppice of pine, staring at the villa intently. Gabriel joined him and stared at it, too. After a few minutes a shadowed figure appeared in the garden and a lighter flared. Keller extended his arm and whispered, “Bang, bang, you’re dead.”
    They remained in the pine trees until the man had returned to the villa. Then they sat in Keller’s darkened Renault thrashing out the final details of their plan of attack—their positions, their sightlines, their firing lanes, their conduct inside the villa itself. After twenty minutes all that remained to be decided was who would take the shot that would set everything in motion. Gabriel insisted he be the one, but Keller objected. Then he reminded Gabriel that he had achieved the highest score ever recorded in the killing house at Hereford.
    “It was an exercise,” said Gabriel dismissively.
    “A live-fire exercise,” Keller countered.
    “It was still an exercise.”
    “What’s your point?”
    “I once shot a Palestinian terrorist between the eyes from the back of a moving motorcycle.”
    “So what?”
    “The terrorist was sitting in the middle of a crowded café on the boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris.”
    “Yes,” said Keller, feigning boredom, “I think I remember reading something about that in one of my history books.”
    In the end it came down to a coin toss.
    “Don’t miss,” said Gabriel, as he slipped the coin back into his pocket.
    “I never miss.”
    By then, it was approaching ten o’clock, too early to move. Keller closed his eyes and slept while Gabriel sat staring at the lights of the easternmost villa. He imagined a small room on the lower level: a cot, handcuffs, a hood, a bucket for a toilet, insulation to muffle the screaming, a woman who was no longer herself. And for an instant he was walking through Russian snow, toward a dacha on the edge of a birch forest. He blinked away the image and absently fingered the hand of red coral hanging around his neck. When she is dead, he was thinking. Then you will know the truth.
    F our hours later he squeezed Keller’s shoulder. Keller woke instantly, climbed out, and removed the rucksack from the trunk of the car. Inside were two rolls of duct tape, a pair of heavy-duty twenty-four-inch bolt cutters, and two suppressors—one for Keller’s HK45 compact, the other for Gabriel’s Beretta. Gabriel screwed the suppressor into the end of the Beretta’s barrel and swung the rucksack over his shoulder. Then he followed Keller down through the pine trees and over the rim of the valley. There was no moon or stars and not a breath of wind. Keller moved through the scrub and rock formations in complete silence, slowly, as if he were under water. Every few steps he would raise his right hand to freeze Gabriel in his tracks, but otherwise they did not communicate. They did not need to. Every step, every move, had been worked out in advance.
    At the base of the hill, they parted. Keller went to the southern side of the villa and settled into a drainage ditch; Gabriel headed for the eastern side and concealed himself in a thicket of briar. His position was fifty feet beyond the line