by Daniel Silva
Ten minutes later, the village of St. Vallier appeared before them, quiet and tightly shuttered. Gabriel pulled over in the center of town, next to a small square, and traded places with Chiara. The Fiat parked on the opposite side of the square and waited. Gabriel told Chiara to take the D5 toward St. Cezaire, then he took out the Beretta nine millimeter he'd been given by Shimon Pazner in Rome. The Fiat followed after them.
It was a long descent, winding and difficult in some sections, straight and fast in others. Chiara drove the same way she'd handled the motor yacht, with skill and a certain easy confidence that Gabriel couldn't help but find attractive.
"Did you take the defensive driving classes at the Academy?"
"Of course."
"Did you learn anything?"
"Number one in my group."
"Show me."
She downshifted and slammed the accelerator to the floor. The Peugeot shot forward, engine screaming. She stayed in that gear, foot to the floor, until the needle topped the red zone, then power-shifted. Gabriel looked over at the speedometer and saw it inching toward 180 kilometers per hour. Her rapid acceleration seemed to catch the driver of the Fiat by surprise, but he recovered quickly and soon was sitting in his usual place, twenty meters off their rear bumper.
"Our friend is back."
"What do you want me to do?"
"Make him work. I want his nerves on edge."
During a long downhill straightaway, Chiara pushed the Peugeot above two hundred. Then she entered a winding section, expertly downshifting and breaking in and out of the turns. Obviously, she had learned her lessons well at the Academy. The man in the Fiat was having trouble keeping pace. Twice, he nearly lost control in the turns.
At the rate of speed they were traveling, it did not take long to reach St. Cezaire. It was a medieval town, walled in places and split in half by the D5. Chiara slowed. Gabriel shouted at her to go faster.
"What if someone crosses the fucking road?"
"I don't care! Go faster, damn it!"
"Gabriel!"
They flashed through the darkened town in a blur. The driver of the Fiat did not have the courage to follow their lead, and slowed as he passed through the town. As a result, he emerged trailing them by some three hundred meters.
"That was fucking insane. We could have killed someone."
"Don't let him get any closer."
The road became a four-lane highway. On their left was a large nature area, famous for its caves and grottoes, and in the distance was a ridge of stark mountains, visible in the bright moonlight.
"Turn there!"
Chiara slammed on the brakes, throwing the Peugeot into a power slide. Then she simultaneously downshifted and hit the accelerator, sending them careening along a dirt track. Gabriel turned around and took another long look over his shoulder. The Fiat had made the turn and was racing after them.
"Kill the lights."
"I won't be able to see."
"Kill them now!"
She switched off the lights and instinctively eased off the gas, but Gabriel shouted at her to go faster, and soon they were plunging through the luminous glow of the moonlight. They entered a grove of scrub oak and umbrella pine. The track hooked sharply to the right. The headlights of the Fiat were nowhere to be seen.
"Stop!"
"Here?
"Stop!"
She slammed on the brakes. Gabriel threw open the door. The air was filled with a choking dust. "Keep going," he said, then leapt out and slammed the door shut.
Chiara did as she was told, continuing in the direction of the mountain ridge. A few seconds later, Gabriel could hear the Fiat speeding toward his position. He stepped off the track and knelt behind an oak, the Beretta in his outstretched hands. As the Fiat came hurtling around the corner, Gabriel fired several shots into the tires.
At least two exploded. The Fiat instantly lost control, bucking and fishtailing, before the centrifugal force of the turn threw it into a violent leftward roll. Gabriel lost count of how many times the car flipped over; a half-dozen at least, perhaps more. He rose to his feet and slowly walked toward the crumpled mass of steel, the Beretta at his side. Somewhere, a mobile phone was ringing.
He found the Fiat wheels-up, resting on its smashed roof. Bending down, he peered through a shattered window and saw the driver, lying on what was once the ceiling. His legs were twisted grotesquely, his chest crushed and bleeding severely. Still, he was conscious, and his hand seemed to be reaching for a gun lying a few inches beyond his fingertips. The eyes were focused, but the hand would not obey the commands of his brain. His neck was snapped, and he didn't realize it.
Finally, his eyes left the gun and settled on Gabriel.
"You were a fool to chase us like that," Gabriel said softly.
"You're an amateur. Your boss sent you on a suicide mission. Who's your boss? He's the man who did this to you, not me."
The man managed little more than a gurgle. He was looking at Gabriel but his gaze was somewhere else. He did not have long to live.
"You're not hurt too badly," Gabriel said gently. "Some cuts and scrapes. Maybe a broken bone or two. Tell me who you're working for, so I can call an ambulance."
The man's lips parted, and he emitted a sound. Gabriel leaned close so he could hear.
"Casszzzz ... Cassszzzzzz.... Zzzzzzz...."
"Casagrande? Carlo Casagrande? Is that what you're trying to tell me?"
"Cassszzzzzz.... zzzzzzz. ..."
Gabriel reached inside the dying man's jacket and gently patted around until he found a wallet. It was soaked with blood. As he dropped it into his pocket, he could hear the telephone ringing again. It had ended up somewhere in the backseat, by the sound of it. He peered through the opening where the rear window had once been and saw the phone, power light aglow, lying on the ground beneath the trunk. He stretched out his hand and took hold of it. Then he pressed the send button and brought it to his ear.
"Pronto."
"What's going on up there? Where is he?"
"He's right here," Gabriel said calmly in Italian. "In fact, he's speaking with you right now."
Silence.
"I know what happened in that convent," Gabriel said. "I know about Crux Vera. I know that you killed my friend. Now, I'm coming for you."
"Where's my man?"
"He's not doing so well at the moment. Would you like a word with him?"
Gabriel placed the telephone on the ground a few inches from the dying man's mouth. As he stood up, he could see the lights of the Peugeot bouncing toward him along the track. Chiara braked to a halt a few yards from where he was standing. Walking back to the car, Gabriel could hear only one sound.
"Casszzzz... Cassszzzzz... Zzzzzzzz...."
ST. CEZAIRE, PROVENCE
Gabriel searched the dead man's wallet by the jade-colored glow of the dashboard lights. He found no driver's license and no formal identification of any kind. Finally, he discovered a business card, folded in half and tucked behind a photograph of a girl in a sleeveless dress. It was so old he had to switch on the overhead light in order to make out the faded name: paulo olivero, ufficio sicurezza di vaticano. He held it aloft for Chiara to see. She glanced at it, then returned her eyes to the road.
"What does it say?"
"That there's a high probability the man I just killed was a Vatican cop."
"Great."
Gabriel memorized the telephone number on the card, then
tore it to shreds and flicked it out the window. They came to the autoroute. When Chiara slowed for guidance, Gabriel directed her west, toward Aix-en-Provence. She lit a cigarette with the dashboard lighter. Her hand was shaking.
"Would you like to tell me where we're going next?"
"Out of Provence as quickly as possible," he said. "After that, I haven't decided."
"Am I allowed to offer an opinion?"
"I don't see why not."
"It's time to go home. You know what happened at the conven
t, and you know who killed Benjamin. There's nothing else you can do but dig yourself deeper into a hole."
"There's more," Gabriel said. "There has to be more."
"What are you talking about?"
He stared absently out his window. The landscape was stark and windswept, red dust in the air. He saw none of it. Instead, he saw Sister Vincenza, sitting on the very spot where Martin Luther and Bishop Lorenzi had sealed their contract of murder, telling him that Benjamin had come to the Convent of the Sacred Heart to hear about the Jews that had taken refuge there. He saw Alessio Rossi, stinking of fear, fingernails gnawed to the quick, telling him how Carlo Casagrande had forced him to abort his investigation of missing priests. He saw Sister Regina Carcassi, listening to Luther and Lorenzi calmly discuss why Pope Pius XII should remain silent in the face of genocide, while a child slept with his head in her lap, a rosary wrapped around his hand.
And finally he saw Benjamin, a boy of twenty, myopic and round-shouldered, brilliant and destined for academic greatness. He had wanted to be a part of the Wrath of God team as badly as Gabriel had wanted to be released from it. Indeed, Benjamin had wanted to be an aleph, an assassin, but his methodical brain did not leave him with the skills necessary to point a Beretta at a man's face in a darkened alley and pull the trigger. It did give him all the tools necessary to be a brilliant support agent, and never once did he make an error--even at the end, when Black September and the European security services were breathing down their necks. This was the Benjamin Gabriel saw now, the Benjamin who would never stake his reputation on the word of a single source or document, no matter how compelling.
"Benjamin wouldn't have written a book implicating the Catholic Church in the Holocaust based only on Sister Regina's letter. He must have had something else."
Chiara swung to the side of the autoroute and applied the brakes. So?
"I worked with Benjamin in the field. I know how he thought, how his mind worked. He was careful to a fault. He had backup plans for his backup plans. Benjamin knew the book would be explosive. That's why he kept the contents so secret. He would have hidden copies of his important material in places his enemies wouldn't think to look." Gabriel hesitated, then added: "But places his friends would think to look."
Chiara stuffed her cigarette into the ashtray. "When I was at the Academy, we were taught how to walk into a room and find a hundred places to conceal something. Documents, weapons, anything at all."
"Benjamin and I did the course together."
"So where are we going?"
Gabriel lifted his hand and pointed straight ahead.
THEY DROVE in shifts, roughly two hours on, two hours off. Chiara managed to sleep during her rest periods, but Gabriel lay awake, the seat reclined, hands behind his head, staring up through the tinted glass of the moon roof. He passed the hours by mentally searching Benjamin's apartment for a second time. He opened books and desk drawers, closets and file cabinets. He planned expeditions into uncharted regions.
Dawn arrived, gray and forbidding, now a siege of torrential rain, now an avalanche of biting Rhone Valley wind. It never seemed to get properly light, and the headlights of the Peugeot stayed on all morning. At the German border, Gabriel felt a sudden fever when the guard seemed to take an extra moment scrutinizing the false Canadian passport that Pazner had given him in Rome.
They sped across a plain of sodden Swabian farmland, keeping pace with the high-speed traffic on the autobahn. In a town called Memmingen, Gabriel stopped for gas. Not far away was a shopping center with a small department store. He sent Chiara inside with a list. He fared better than he had in Cannes: two pairs of gray trousers, two button-down shirts, a black pullover sweater, a pair of black crepe-soled shoes, a quilted nylon raincoat. A second bag contained two flashlights and a pack of batteries, along with screwdrivers, pliers, and wrenches.
Gabriel changed in the car while Chiara drove the final miles to Munich. It was mid-afternoon by the time they arrived. The sky was low and dark, and it was raining steadily. Operational weather, Shamron would have called it. A gift from the intelligence gods. Gabriel's head was throbbing with exhaustion, and his eyes felt as though there was sand beneath the lids. He tried to remember the last time he'd had a proper night's sleep. He looked at Chiara and saw that she was hanging on to the steering wheel as though it were the only thing keeping her upright. A hotel was out of the question. Chiara had an idea.
JUST BEYOND the old city center, near the Reichenbachplatz, stands a rather drab, flat-fronted stucco building. Above the glass double doors is a sign. Judisches Einkaufszentrum von Munchen: Jewish Community Center of Munich. Chiara parked outside the front entrance and hurried inside. She returned five minutes later, drove around the corner, and parked opposite a side entrance. A girl was holding open the door. She was Chiara's age, heavy-hipped, with hair the color of a raven's wing. "How did you manage this?" Gabriel asked. "They called my father in Venice. He vouched for us." The interior of the center was modern and lit by harsh fluorescent light. They followed the girl up a staircase to the top floor, where they were shown into a small room with a bare linoleum floor and a pair of matching twin beds made up with beige spreads. To Gabriel, it seemed rather like a sick ward.
"We keep it for guests and emergencies," the girl said. "You're welcome to use it for a few hours. Through that door is a bathroom with a shower."
"I need to send a fax," Gabriel said. "There's one downstairs. I'll take you."
Gabriel followed her to a small office near the main reception area.
"Do you have a copier?"
"Of course. Right over there."
Gabriel removed Sister Regina Carcassi's letter from his jacket pocket and made a photocopy. Then he scribbled a few words on a separate piece of paper and handed them all to the girl. Gabriel recited the number from memory, and she fed the pages into the fax machine.
"Vienna?" she asked.
Gabriel nodded. He heard the squelch as the fax machine made!
If contact with Eli Lavon's office, then watched the pages slip through!
the feeder tray one by one. Two minutes after the transmission was complete, the fax machine rang and spit out a single page with two hastily scrawled words.
Documents received.
Gabriel recognized the handwriting as Lavon's.
"Do you need anything else?"
"Just a few hours of sleep."
"That I can't help you with." She smiled at him for the first time. "Can you find your way back upstairs?"
"No problem."
When he returned to the guest room, the curtains were tightly drawn. Chiara lay on one of the beds, knees pulled to her chest already asleep. Gabriel undressed and slid beneath the blanket of the second bed, quietly settling onto the creaking bedsprings so as not to wake her. Then he closed his eyes and tumbled into a dreamless sleep.
In Vienna Eli Lavon stood over his fax machine, cigarette between his lips, squinting at the document pinched between the tips of his nicotine-stained fingers. He walked back to his office where a man sat in the heavy afternoon shadows. Lavon waved the pages.
"Our hero and heroine have surfaced."
"Where are they?" asked Ari Shamron.
Lavon looked down at the fax and found the telephone number of the transmitting machine. "It appears they're in Munich."
Shamron closed his eyes. "Where in Munich?"
Lavon consulted the fax once more, and this time he was smiling when he looked up. "It looks as though our boy has found his way back to the bosom of his people."
"And the document?"
"I'm afraid Italian is not one of my languages, but based on the first line, I'd say he found Sister Regina."
"Let me see that."
Lavon handed the fax pages to Shamron. He read the first line aloud--"Mi chiamo Regina Carcassi.. ."--then looked up sharply at Lavon.
"Do you know anyone who speaks Italian?"
"I can find someone."
"Now, Eli."
When Gabriel woke the darkness was complete. He raised his wrist to his face and focused his gaze on the luminous dial of his watch. Ten o'clock. He reached down toward the floor and groped through his clothing until he found Sister Regina's letter. He breathed again.
Chiara lay next to him. At some point she had left her own bed and, like a small child, crawled into his. Her back was turned to him, and her hair lay across his pillow. When he touched her shoulder, she rolled over and faced him. Her eyes were damp.
"What's wrong?"
"I was just thinking."
"About what?"
A long silence, broken by the blare of a car horn outside their window. "I used to pop into the Church of San Zaccaria while you were working. I'd see you up there on your scaffolding, hidden behind your shroud. Sometimes, I'd peer around the edge and see you staring at the face of the Virgin."
"Obviously, I'm going to have to get a bigger shroud."
"It's her, isn't it? When you look at the Virgin, you see the face of your wife. You see her scars." When Gabriel made no response, Chiara propped her head on her elbow and studied his face, running her forefinger down the length of his nose, as though it were sculpture. "I feel so sorry for you."
"I have no one to blame but myself. I was a fool to bring her into the field."
"That's why I feel sorry for you. If you could blame someone else, it might be easier."
She laid her head on his chest and was silent for a moment. "God, but I hate this place. Munich. The place where it all started. Did you know Hitler had a headquarters a few streets over?"