The Fallen Angel

you think I ever stopped?” Pazner walked in silence for a moment. “I don’t suppose that woman actually threw herself from the dome of the Basilica, did she?”
    “No, Shimon, she didn’t.”
    “Any idea why she was killed?”
    “I have a theory, but I can’t pursue it without help.”
    “What kind of help?”
    “Forensic help,” replied Gabriel. “I need Unit 8200 to have a look under her fingernails.”
    Unit 8200 was Israel’s signals intelligence service, the equivalent of the National Security Agency in the United States. Though formally under the command of the military chief of staff, it carried out tasks for all the Israeli intelligence and security agencies, including the Office. Its alumni included some of the most successful entrepreneurs in Israel’s thriving high-tech industry.
    “Let me see if I understand this correctly,” Pazner said. “The State of Israel is currently facing existential threats too numerous to count, and you would like the Unit to expend valuable time and effort data-mining a dead Italian woman?”
    Gabriel said nothing. Pazner exhaled heavily.
    “How far back do you need them to go?”
    “Six months. E-mails, browsing histories, data searches.”
    Pazner ignited another cigarette and blew smoke at the moon. “If I had an ounce of common sense, I’d drop this down a very deep hole, and you with it. But now you owe me one, Gabriel. And I never forget a debt.”
    “How can I ever possibly repay you, Shimon?”
    “You can start by telling your wife to stop dropping my watchers when she’s running her errands. I put them there for her own good.”
    “I’ll see what I can do. Anything else?”
    “If you happen to spot a team of Hezbollah operatives walking around Rome, give me a call. But do me a favor, and leave your gun in your pocket. I have enough problems.”

8
     
    PIAZZA DI SPAGNA, ROME
     
    T HEY APPROACHED THE CASE THE way they did most things in life, with the alert, operational calm of a covert team working in a hostile land. Their target was the killer of Claudia Andreatti. And now, with the arrival of her files from the Vatican, they had the means to begin their search. Still, they braced themselves for the prospect of disappointment. The files were a bit like intelligence. And Gabriel and Chiara knew that intelligence was often incomplete, contradictory, misleading, or a combination of all three.
    They worked under the assumption that others were watching their every move, and conducted themselves accordingly. Gabriel in particular had no choice but to maintain his busy daily routine. He was a man of many faces and many different missions. To the youthful Swiss Guards who greeted him each morning at St. Anne’s Gate, he was a fellow soldier, a secret sentinel, and a sometime ally. To his colleagues in the restoration lab, he was the gifted but melancholic loner who spent his days behind his black curtain, alone with his Caravaggio and his demons. And to the Italian watchers who trailed him home each afternoon, he was a legendary operative with a past so tangled they knew only bits and pieces of the story. Upon entering the apartment, he would invariably find Chiara hunched over a stack of printouts. Gabriel would work by her side for several more hours before taking her into the streets of Rome for a late supper. They ate only in small restaurants frequented by locals and never spoke of the case outside the walls of the flat.
    With each passing day, Claudia Andreatti slipped further from the public’s consciousness. The doubts surrounding the publicly stated circumstances of her death diminished, the stories disappeared from the newspapers, and even the most conspiracy-minded Web sites reluctantly concluded it was time to allow her troubled soul to rest in peace. But in the little apartment above the Spanish Steps, the questions persisted. Regrettably, the files given to Gabriel by Father Mark provided not a single answer. The institution they portrayed had been blessed by the fact that, for more than a millennium, the popes held direct sovereign rule over the Papal States, an archaeologically fertile land bursting with Etruscan, Greek, and Roman antiquities. Still, like traditional museums, the Vatican had supplemented its vast holdings by purchasing or inheriting private collections. Here was a potential area for trouble. What if, for example, a private collection contained material that had been illegally excavated or had no clear