The Grand Hotel Berkshire was just such a place. It stood at the end of a terrace of flaking Edwardian houses in West Crom well Road. The night manager, a tired man in a tired gray sweater, expressed little surprise when Gabriel said he had no reservation and even less when he announced he would pay the bill for his stay-three nights, perhaps two if his business went well-entirely in cash. He then handed the manager a pair of crisp twenty-pound notes and said he was expecting no visitors of any kind, nor did he want to be disturbed by telephone calls or maid service. The night manager slipped the money into his pocket and promised Gabriel’s stay would be both private and secure. Gabriel bade him a pleasant evening and saw himself upstairs to his room.
Located on the third floor overlooking the busy street, it stank of loneliness and the last occupant’s appalling cologne. Closing the door behind him, Gabriel found himself overcome by a sudden wave of depression. How many nights had he spent in rooms just like it? Perhaps Chiara was right. Perhaps it was time to finally leave the Office and allow the fighting to be done by other men. He would take to the hills of Umbria and give his new wife the child she so desperately wanted, the child Gabriel had denied himself because of what had happened on a snowy night in Vienna in another lifetime. He had not chosen that life. It had been chosen for him by others. It had been chosen by Yasir Arafat and a band of Palestinian terrorists known as Black September. And it had been chosen by Ari Shamron.
Shamron had come for him on a brilliant afternoon in Jerusalem in September 1972. Gabriel was a promising young painter who had forsaken a post in an elite military unit to pursue his formal training at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. Shamron had just been given command of Operation Wrath of God, the secret Israeli intelligence operation to hunt down and assassinate the perpetrators of the Munich Olympics massacre. He required an instrument of vengeance, and Gabriel was exactly the sort of young man for whom he was searching: brash but intelligent, loyal but independent, emotionally cold but inherently decent. He also spoke fluent German with the Berlin accent of his mother and had traveled extensively in Europe as a child.
After a month of intense training, Shamron dispatched him to Rome, where he killed a man named Wadal Abdel Zwaiter in the foyer of an apartment building in the Piazza Annibaliano. He and his team of operatives then spent the next three years stalking their prey across Western Europe, killing at night and in broad daylight, living in fear that, at any moment, they would be arrested by European police and charged as murderers.
When finally Gabriel returned home again, his temples were the color of ash and his face was that of a man twenty years his senior. Leah, whom he had married shortly before leaving Israel, scarcely recognized him when he entered their apartment. A gifted artist in her own right, she asked him to sit for a portrait. Rendered in the style of Egon Schiele, it showed a haunted young man, aged prematurely by the shadow of death. The canvas was among the finest Leah ever produced. Gabriel had always hated it, for it portrayed with brutal honesty the toll Wrath of God had taken on him.
Physically exhausted and stripped of his desire to paint, he sought refuge in Venice, where he studied the craft of restoration under the renowned Umberto Conti. When his apprenticeship was complete, Shamron summoned him back to active duty. Working undercover as a professional art restorer, Gabriel eliminated Israel’s most dangerous foes and carried out a series of quiet investigations that earned him important friends in Washington, the Vatican, and London. But he had powerful adversaries as well. He could not walk a street without the nagging fear that he was being stalked by one of his enemies. Nor could he sleep in a hotel room without first barricading the door with a chair, which he did now.
He loaded the disk of the CCTV footage into the in-room DVD player, then, after removing only his shoes, climbed into the bed. For the next several hours he watched the surveillance video over and over, trying to blend what he could see on the screen with what he had experienced on the streets of Maida Vale. Unable to find the connection, he switched off the television. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, the images of Grigori’s final moments appeared like photographs on an overhead projector. Grigori entering a car on Harrow Road. A well-dressed man with an umbrella. A woman in a leather coat, hatless in the rain. The last image dissolved into a painting, darkened by a layer of dirty varnish. Gabriel closed his eyes, dipped a swab in solvent, and twirled it gently against the surface.
THE ANSWER came to him an hour before dawn. He groped in the gloom for the remote and pointed it at the screen. A few seconds later, it flickered to life. It was 17:47 last Tuesday. Grigori Bulganov was standing in the passageway of Bristol Mews. At 17:48, he dropped his cigarette and started walking.
HE FOLLOWED the now-familiar route to the Waterside Café. At 18:03:37, the young couple appeared precisely on schedule, belted raincoat for the man, woolen coat with fur collar for the woman. Gabriel reversed the image and watched the scene again, then a third time. Then he pressed PAUSE. According to the time code, it was 18:04:25 when the couple reached the end of the Westbourne Terrace Road Bridge. If the operation had been well planned-and all evidence suggested it had-there was plenty of time.
Gabriel advanced the video to the final thirty seconds and watched one last time as Grigori entered the back of the Mercedes. As the car slid from view, a small, well-dressed man entered from the left. Then, a few seconds later, came the woman in the car-length leather coat. No umbrella. Hatless in the rain.
Gabriel froze the image and looked at her shoes.
15
IT WAS BITTERLY COLD in Parliament Square, but not cold enough to keep the protesters at bay. There was the inevitable demonstration against the crimes of Israel, another calling for the Americans to leave Iraq, and still another that predicted the south of England would soon be turned to desert by global warming. Gabriel walked to the other side of the square and sat on an empty bench, opposite the North Tower of Westminster Abbey. It was the same bench where he had once waited for the daughter of the American ambassador to be delivered to the abbey by two jihadist suicide bombers. He wondered whether Graham Seymour had chosen the spot intentionally or if the unpleasantness of that morning had simply slipped his mind.
A chauffeured Jaguar limousine eased to the edge of the square shortly after three. Seymour emerged from the back, wearing a chesterfield coat. He waited until the car had sped off down Victoria Street before walking over to the bench. This time, it was Seymour who was late.
“Sorry, Gabriel, my meeting with the prime minister went longer than expected.”
“How is he?”
“Given the fact he’s the most unpopular British leader in a generation, he put on a rather good show. And for a change we were actually able to bring him a bit of good news.”
“What’s that?”
“Nice try.”
“Come on, Graham.” Gabriel glanced toward the façade of the abbey. “We have a history, you and I.”
Seymour said nothing for a moment. “Bloody awful day, wasn’t it? I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to get that image out of my mind, the image of you-”
“I remember it, Graham. I was there.”
Seymour tucked the ends of his woolen scarf under the lapel of his overcoat. “As we speak, officers of the Metropolitan Police are conducting raids across East London.”