The Confessor (23 page)

He opened Malone’s documents folder and inspected the dates and times of the latest entries. In the final hour of his life, the reporter had created two new documents, one entitled I
SRAELI
A
SSASSIN
, the second labeled B
ENJAMIN
S
TERN
M
URDER
. Lange felt a lightness in his fingertips. Outside, the wind of the Channel storm sounded like a passing bullet train.

He opened the first file. It was a remarkable document. Shortly before Lange had entered Malone’s flat, the investigative journalist had interviewed a man who claimed to be an Israeli assassin. Lange read the file with a certain professional admiration. The man had had quite a colorful and productive career: Black September, a couple of Libyans, an Iraqi nuclear scientist.

Abu Jihad . . .

Lange stopped reading and looked out the French doors at the trees twisting in the storm.
Abu Jihad?
Had the killer of Abu Jihad truly been in Malone’s apartment a few hours before Lange? If it was true, what on earth was he doing there? Lange was not a man who put much stock in coincidence. The answer, he suspected, could be found in the second document. He opened it and started to read.

Five minutes later, Lange looked up. It was worse than he had feared. The Israeli agent who had calmly walked into Abu Jihad’s villa in Tunis and killed him was now investigating the murder of Professor Benjamin Stern. Lange wondered why the Jewish professor’s death would be of interest to Israeli intelligence. The answer seemed simple: The professor must have been an agent of some sort.

He was furious with Carlo Casagrande. If Casagrande had told him that Benjamin Stern was connected to Israeli intelligence, he might very well have refused the contract. The Israelis unnerved him. They played the game differently than the Western Europeans and the Americans. They came from a tough neighborhood, and the shadow of the Holocaust hung over their every decision. It led them to deal with their adversaries in a ruthless and pitiless fashion. They had pursued Lange once before, after a kidnapping and ransom operation he had carried out on behalf of Abu Jihad. He had managed to slip through their fingers by taking the rather draconian step of killing all his accomplices.

Lange wondered whether Carlo Casagrande was aware of the Israeli’s involvement—and if he was, why he hadn’t hired Lange to deal with it. Perhaps Casagrande didn’t know how to find the Israeli. Thanks to the documents on Peter Malone’s computer, Lange did know how to find him, and he had no intention of waiting for orders from Casagrande to act. He had a slight advantage, a brief window of opportunity, but he had to move swiftly or the window would close.

He copied the two files onto a disk, then erased them from the hard drive. Katrine, wrapped in the duvet from her bed, came into the room and sat down at the other end of the couch. Lange closed the computer.

“You promised to cook for me,” she said. “I’m famished.”

“I have to go to Paris.”

“
Now?
”

Lange nodded.

“Can’t it wait until morning?”

He shook his head.

“What’s so important in Paris?”

Lange looked out the window. “I need to find a man.”

RASHID HUSSEINI
did not look much like a professional terrorist. He had a round fleshy face and large brown eyes heavy with fatigue. His wrinkled tweed jacket and turtleneck sweater gave him the appearance of a doctoral student at work on a dissertation he could not quite finish. It wasn’t far from the truth. Husseini lived in France on a student visa, though he rarely found time to attend his courses at the Sorbonne. He taught English at a language center in a dreary Muslim suburb north of Paris, did the odd bit of translation work, and occasionally wrote incendiary commentary for various left-wing French journals. Eric Lange was aware of the true source of Husseini’s income. He worked for a branch of the Palestinian Authority few people knew about. Rashid Husseini—student, translator, journalist—was chief of European operations for the PLO’s foreign intelligence service. Husseini was the reason Eric Lange had come to Paris.

Lange telephoned the Palestinian at his apartment on the rue de Tournon. An hour later, they met in a deserted brasserie in the Luxembourg Quarter. Husseini, a secular Palestinian nationalist of the old school, drank red wine. Alcohol made him talkative. He lectured Lange on the suffering of the Palestinian people. It was virtually identical to the diatribe he had inflicted on Lange in Tunis twenty years ago, when he and Abu Jihad were trying to seduce Lange into working for the Palestinian cause. The land and the olive trees, the injustice and the humiliation. “The Jews are the world’s new Nazis,” Husseini opined. “In the West Bank and Gaza, they operate like the Gestapo and the SS. The Israeli prime minister? He’s a war criminal who deserves the justice of Nuremberg.” Lange bided his time, stirring his coffee with a tiny silver spoon and nodding sagely at appropriate moments. He couldn’t help but feel sorry for Husseini. The war had passed him by. Once it had been waged by men like Rashid Husseini, intellectuals who read Camus in French and screwed stupid German girls on the beaches of St-Tropez. Now the old fighters had grown fat on handouts from the Europeans and Americans while children, the precious fruit of Palestine, were blowing themselves up in the cafés and markets of Israel.

Finally, Husseini threw his hands up in a helpless gesture, like an old man who knows he has become a bore. “Forgive me, Eric, but my passion always gets the better of me. I know you didn’t come here tonight to talk about the suffering of my people. What is it? Are you looking for work?”

Lange leaned forward over the table. “I was wondering whether you might be interested in helping me find the man who killed our friend in Tunis.”

Husseini’s tired eyes came suddenly to life. “Abu Jihad? I was there that night. I was the first one to enter the study after that Israeli monster had done his evil work. I can still hear the screaming of Abu Jihad’s wife and children. If I had the opportunity, I’d kill him myself.”

“What do you know about him?”

“His real name is Allon—Gabriel Allon—but he’s used dozens of aliases. He’s an art restorer. Used his job as cover for his killings in Europe. An old comrade of mine named Tariq al-Hourani put a bomb beneath Allon’s car in Vienna about twelve years back and blew up his wife and son. The boy was killed. We were never sure what happened to the wife. Allon took his revenge against Tariq a couple of years ago in Manhattan.”

“I remember,” Lange said. “That affair with Arafat.”

Husseini nodded. “You know where he is?”

“No, but I think I know where he’s going.”

“Where?”

Lange told him.

“
Rome
? Rome is a big city, my friend. You’re going to have to give me more than that.”

“He’s investigating the murder of an old friend. He’s going to Rome to find an Italian detective named Alessio Rossi. Follow Rossi and the Israeli will fall into your lap.”

Husseini jotted the name in a small, leather-bound notebook and looked up.
“Carabinieri? Polizia di Stato?”

“The latter,” said Lange, and Husseini wrote
PS
in the book.

The Palestinian sipped his wine and studied Lange a long moment without speaking. Lange knew the questions running through Husseini’s mind. How did Eric Lange know where the Israeli assassin was going? And why did he want him dead? Lange decided to answer the questions before Husseini could ask them.

“He’s after me. It’s a personal matter. I want him dead, and so do you. In that respect, we have common interests. If we work together, the matter can be resolved in a way that suits us both.”

A smile spread over Husseini’s face. “You were always a very cool customer, weren’t you, Eric? Never one to let your emotions get the better of you. I would have enjoyed working with you.”

“Do you have the resources in Rome to mount a surveillance operation against a police officer?”

“I could follow the Pope himself. If the Israeli is in Rome, we’ll find him. But that’s all we’re going to do. The last thing the movement needs at the moment is to engage in extracurricular activity on European soil.” He winked. “Remember, we’ve renounced terrorism. Besides, the Europeans are the best friends we have.”

“Just find him,” said Lange. “Leave the killing to me.”

PART THREE
A PENSIONE IN ROME

T
HE
A
BRUZZI HAD FALLEN
on hard times. Located in the San Lorenzo Quarter, between
Stazione Termini
train station and the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, its mustard-colored façade looked as though it had been raked by machine-gun fire, and the lobby smelled of cat litter. Despite its tumbledown appearance, the little pensione suited Gabriel’s needs perfectly. The headquarters of the
Polizia di Stato
was a short walk away, and unlike most pensiones in Rome, this one had a telephone in each room. Most importantly, if Crux Vera was searching for him, the last place they would look was the Abruzzi.

The night manager was an overweight man with round shoulders and a florid face. Gabriel checked in under the name Heinrich Siedler and spoke to him in labored Italian with a murderous German accent. The manager appraised Gabriel with a pair of melancholy eyes, then jotted down his name and passport number in the hotel registry.

Gabriel crossed a cluttered common room, where a pair of Croatian teenagers was engaged in a ferocious Ping-Pong match. He trod silently up the soiled staircase, let himself into his room, and locked the door. He entered the bathroom. The rust stains in the sink looked like dried blood. He washed his face, then removed his shoes and collapsed onto the bed. He tried to close his eyes but could not. Too exhausted to sleep, he lay on his back, listening to the
TAP-a-TAP-a-TAP
of the table-tennis match downstairs, reliving the last twenty-four hours.

He had been traveling since dawn. Instead of flying directly from London to Rome, which would have required him to clear customs at Fiumicino Airport, he had flown to Nice. At the airport there he had paid a visit to the Hertz outlet, where a friend of the Office called Monsieur Henri had rented him a Renault sedan in such a way that it could never be traced back to him. From Nice, he drove toward Italy along the A8
autoroute.
Near Monaco, he switched on the English-language Radio Riviera to catch a bit of news on the war in the territories and learned instead that Peter Malone had been found shot to death in his London home.

Parked at the side of the motorway, traffic hurtling past, Gabriel had listened to the rest of the report with his hands strangling the steering wheel and his heart banging against his ribs. Like a chess grand master, he had played out the moves and saw disaster looming. He had spent two hours inside the reporter’s home. Malone had taken copious notes. Surely the Metropolitan Police had discovered those notes. Because of the intelligence connection, they had probably briefed MI5. There was a very good chance every major police force and security service in Europe was looking for the Israeli assassin code-named Sword.
The safe thing to do?
Call Shamron on an emergency line, arrange a bolt-hole, and sit on the beach in Netanya until things cooled down. But that would entail surrendering the search for Benjamin’s killers. And Malone’s. He pulled back onto the
autoroute
and accelerated toward Italy. At the border, a drowsy guard admitted him into the country with a languid wave of his hand.