Текст книги "The English Spy"

Автор книги: Daniel Silva

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 27 страниц) [доступный отрывок для чтения: 10 страниц]

22

WARRING STREET, BELFAST

IT COULD BE ANYONE,” said Keller.

“It could be,” replied Gabriel. “But it isn’t. It’s Quinn.”

They were in Keller’s room at the Premiere Inn on Warring Street. It was around the corner from the Europa and far less luxurious. He had checked in as Adrien LeBlanc and had spoken French-accented English to the staff. Gabriel, during his brief journey across the drab lobby, had said nothing at all.

“Where do you suppose they are?” asked Keller, still studying the photograph.

“Good question.”

“There are no signs on the buildings or cars on the street. It’s almost as if—”

“He chose the spot with great care.”

“Maybe it’s Caracas.”

“Or maybe it’s Santiago or Buenos Aires.”

“Ever been?”

“Where?”

“Buenos Aires,” said Keller.

“Several times, actually.”

“Business or pleasure?”

“I don’t do pleasure.”

Keller smiled and looked at the photo again. “It looks a bit like the old center of Bogotá to me.”

“I’ll have to take your word on that one.”

“Or maybe it’s Madrid.”

“Maybe.”

“Let me see that ticket stub.”

Gabriel handed it over. Keller scrutinized the front side carefully. Then he turned it over and ran his finger along the portion of the magnetic stripe.

“A few years ago,” he said at last, “the don accepted a contract on a gentleman who’d stolen a great deal of money from people who don’t care to have their money stolen. The gentleman was in hiding in a city like the one in this photograph. It was an old city of faded beauty, a city of hills and streetcars.”

“What was the gentleman’s name?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“Where was he hiding?”

“I’m getting to that.”

Keller was studying the front of the ticket again. “Because this gentleman had no car, he was by necessity a dedicated user of public transport. I followed him for a week before the hit, which meant that I had to be a dedicated user of public transport, too.”

“Do you recognize the ticket, Christopher?”

“I might.”

Keller picked up Gabriel’s BlackBerry, opened Google, and typed several characters into the search box. When the results appeared, he clicked one and smiled.

“Find it?” asked Gabriel.

Keller turned the BlackBerry around so Gabriel could see the screen. On it was a complete version of the ticket he had found in the home of Maggie Donahue.

“Where’s it from?” asked Gabriel.

“A city of hills and streetcars.”

“I take it you’re not referring to San Francisco.”

“No,” said Keller. “It’s Lisbon.”

“That doesn’t prove the photo was taken there,” Gabriel said after a moment.

“Agreed,” answered Keller. “But if we can prove that Catherine Donahue was there . . .”

Gabriel said nothing.

“You didn’t happen to see her passport when you were in that house, did you?”

“No such luck.”

“Then I suppose we’ll have to think of some other way to have a look at it.”

Gabriel picked up his BlackBerry and keyed in a brief message to Graham Seymour in London, requesting information on any and all foreign travel by Catherine Donahue of 8 Stratford Gardens, Belfast, Northern Ireland. One hour later, as darkness fell hard upon the city, they had their answer.

The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office issued the passport on November 10, 2013. One week later she boarded a British Airways flight in Belfast and flew to London’s Heathrow Airport where, ninety minutes later, she transferred to a second British Airways flight, bound for Lisbon. According to Portuguese immigration authorities, she remained in the country for just three days. It was her one and only foreign trip.

“None of which proves Quinn was living there at the time,” Keller pointed out.

“Why bring her to Lisbon of all places? Why not Monaco or Cannes or St. Moritz?”

“Maybe Quinn was on a budget.”

“Or maybe he keeps an apartment there, something in a charming old building in the kind of neighborhood where no one would notice a foreigner coming and going.”

“Know any places like that?”

“I’ve spent my life living in places like that.”

Keller was silent for a moment. “What now?” he asked finally.

“I suppose we could take the photo and my composite sketch to Lisbon and start knocking on doors.”

“Or?”

“We retain the services of someone who specializes in finding those who would rather not be found.”

“Any candidates?”

“Just one.”

Gabriel picked up his BlackBerry and dialed Eli Lavon.

23

BELFAST–LISBON

THEY DECIDED TO TAKE the long way down to Lisbon. Better to not hit town too quickly, said Gabriel. Better to take care with their travel arrangements and their tail. For the first time, Quinn was in their sights. He was no longer just a rumor. He was a man on a street, with a daughter at his side. He had flesh on his bones, blood in his veins. He could be found. And then he could be put out of his misery.

And so they left Belfast as they had entered it, quietly and under false pretenses. Monsieur LeBlanc told the clerk at the Premiere that he had a small personal crisis to attend to; Herr Klemp spun a similar tale at the Europa. Passing through the lobby he saw Maggie Donahue, secret wife of the murderer, serving a very large whiskey to an inebriated businessman. She avoided Herr Klemp’s gaze, and Herr Klemp avoided hers.

They drove to Dublin, abandoned the car at the airport, and checked into a pair of rooms at the Radisson. In the morning they ate breakfast like strangers in the hotel’s restaurant and then boarded separate flights to Paris, Gabriel on Aer Lingus, Keller on Air France. Gabriel’s flight arrived first. He collected a clean Citroën from the car park and was waiting in the arrivals lane as Keller emerged from the terminal.

They spent that night in Biarritz, where Gabriel had once taken a life in vengeance, and the next night in the Spanish city of Vitoria, where Keller, at the behest of Don Anton Orsati, had once killed a member of the Basque separatist group ETA. Gabriel could see that Keller’s ties to his old life were beginning to fray, that Keller, with each passing day, was growing more comfortable with the prospect of working for Graham Seymour at MI6. Quinn had unleashed the chain of events that had broken Keller’s bonds with England. And now, twenty-five years later, Quinn was leading Keller back home.

From Vitoria they moved on to Madrid, and from Madrid they drove to Badajoz along the Portuguese border. Keller was anxious to push on to Lisbon, but at Gabriel’s insistence they headed farther west and caught the season’s last faint rays of sun at Estoril. They stayed in separate hotels along the beach and led the separate lives of men without wives, without children, without care or responsibility. Gabriel spent several hours each day making certain they were not under surveillance. He was tempted to send a message to Chiara in Jerusalem but did not. Nor did he make contact with Eli Lavon. Lavon was one of the most experienced man-trackers in the world. In his youth he had hunted down the members of Black September, perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. Then, after leaving the Office, he had gone into private practice, tracking looted Holocaust assets and the occasional Nazi war criminal. If there were any trace of Quinn in Lisbon—a residence, an alias, another wife or child—Lavon would find it.

But when two more days passed without word, even Gabriel began to have doubts, not in Lavon’s ability but in his faith that Quinn was somehow linked to Lisbon. Perhaps Catherine Donahue had traveled to the city with friends or as part of a school trip. Perhaps the trousers Gabriel had found in Maggie Donahue’s closet had belonged to another man, as had the torn ticket for Lisbon’s streetcar system. They would have to search for him elsewhere, he thought—in Iran, or Lebanon, or Yemen, or Venezuela, or in any of the countless other places where Quinn had plied his deadly trade. Quinn was a man of the underworld. Quinn could be anywhere.

But on the third morning of their stay, Gabriel received a brief but promising message from Eli Lavon suggesting that the man in question was thought to be a frequent visitor to the city of interest. By midday Lavon was certain of it, and by late afternoon he had uncovered an address. Gabriel rang Keller at his hotel and told him they were ready to move. They left Estoril as they had entered it, quietly and under false pretenses, and headed for Lisbon.

“He calls himself Alvarez.”

“Portuguese or Spanish spelling?”

“That depends on his mood.”

Eli Lavon smiled. They were seated at a table in Café Brasileira, in the Chiado district of Lisbon. It was half past nine and the café was very crowded. No one seemed to take much notice of the two men of late middle age hunched over cups of coffee in the corner. They conversed in quiet German, one of several languages they had in common. Gabriel spoke in the Berlin accent of his mother, but Lavon’s German was decidedly Viennese. He wore a cardigan sweater beneath his crumpled tweed jacket and an ascot at his throat. His hair was wispy and unkempt; the features of his face were bland and easily forgotten. It was one of his greatest assets. Eli Lavon appeared to be one of life’s downtrodden. In truth, he was a natural predator who could follow a highly trained intelligence officer or hardened terrorist down any street in the world without attracting a flicker of interest.

“First name?” asked Gabriel.

“Sometimes José. Other times he’s Jorge.”

“Nationality?”

“Sometimes Venezuelan, sometimes Ecuadorian.” Lavon smiled. “Are you beginning to see a pattern?”

“But he never tries to pass himself off as Portuguese?”

“He doesn’t have the language for it. Even his Spanish is on the rough side. Apparently, he has quite an accent.”

Someone at the bar must have said something funny, because a sonic boom of laughter reverberated off the checkered tile floor and died out high in the ceiling, where the chandeliers emitted a gauzy golden glow. Gabriel looked past Lavon’s shoulder and imagined that Quinn was sitting at the next table. But it wasn’t Quinn; it was Christopher Keller. He was holding a cup of coffee in his right hand. The right hand meant they were clean, the left meant trouble. Gabriel looked at Lavon again and asked about the location of Quinn’s apartment. Lavon inclined his head in the direction of the Bairro Alto.

“What’s the building like?”

Lavon made a gesture with his hand to indicate it fell somewhere between acceptable and condemnable.

“Concierge?”

“In the Bairro Alto?”

“What floor?”

“Second.”

“Can we get inside?”

“I’m surprised you’d even ask. The question is,” Lavon continued, “do we want to get inside?”

“Do we?”

Lavon shook his head. “When one is fortunate enough to find the pied-à-terre of a man like Eamon Quinn, one doesn’t risk throwing it away by rushing through the front door. One acquires a fixed observation post and waits patiently for the target to appear.”

“Unless there are other factors to consider.”

“Such as?”

“The possibility another bomb might explode.”

“Or that one’s wife is about to give birth to twins.”

Gabriel frowned but said nothing.

“In case you’re wondering,” said Lavon, “she’s doing well.”

“Is she angry?”

“She’s seven and a half months pregnant, and her husband is sitting in a café in Lisbon. How do you think she feels?”

“How’s her security?”

“Narkiss Street is quite possibly the safest street in all Jerusalem. Uzi keeps a security team outside the door all hours.” Lavon hesitated, then added, “But all the bodyguards in the world are no substitute for a husband.”

Gabriel made no reply.

“May I make a suggestion?”

“If you must.”

“Go back to Jerusalem for a few days. Your friend and I can keep watch on the apartment. If Quinn shows up, you’ll be the first to know.”

“If I go to Jerusalem,” replied Gabriel, “I’ll never want to leave.”

“Which is why I suggested it.” Lavon cleared his throat gently. It was a warning of an impending intimacy. “Your wife would like you to know that in one month’s time, perhaps less, you will be a father again. She’d like you to be present for the occasion. Otherwise, your life won’t be worth living.”

“Did she say anything else?”

“She might have mentioned something about Eamon Quinn.”

“What was that?”

“Apparently, Uzi’s briefed her on the operation. Your wife doesn’t take kindly to men who blow up innocent women and children. She’d like you to find Quinn before you come home. And then,” Lavon added, “she’d like you to kill him.”

Gabriel glanced at Keller and said, “That won’t be necessary.”

“Yes,” said Lavon. “Lucky you.”

Gabriel smiled and drank some of his coffee. Lavon reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a silver thumb drive. He placed it on the table and pushed it toward Gabriel.

“As requested, the complete Office file on Tariq al-Hourani, born in Palestine during the great Arab catastrophe, shot to death in the stairwell of a Manhattan apartment building shortly before the Twin Towers came tumbling down.” Lavon paused, then added, “I believe you were there at the time. Somehow, I wasn’t invited.”

Gabriel stared at the thumb drive in silence. There were portions of the file he would not force himself to read again—for it was Tariq al-Hourani who, on a snowy January night in 1991, had planted a bomb beneath Gabriel’s car in Vienna. The explosion had killed Gabriel’s son Dani and maimed Leah, his first wife. She lived now in a psychiatric hospital atop Mount Herzl, trapped in a prison of memory and a body destroyed by fire. During a recent visit, Gabriel had told her he would soon be a father again.

“I would have thought,” said Lavon quietly, “that you knew his file by heart.”

“I do,” said Gabriel. “But I’d like to refresh my memory about one particular part of his career.”

“What’s that?”

“The time he spent in Libya.”

“You have a hunch?”

“Maybe.”

“Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

“I’m glad you’re here, Eli.”

Lavon stirred his coffee slowly. “That makes one of us.”

They emerged from Brasileira’s famous green door into a tiled square where Fernando Pessoa sat bronzed for all eternity, his punishment for being Portugal’s most famous poet and man of letters. A cold wind from the Tagus swirled in an amphitheater of graceful yellow buildings; a tram clattered past in the Largo Chiado. Gabriel imagined Quinn sitting in a seat in the window, Quinn of the surgically altered face and merciless heart, Quinn the prostitute of death. Lavon was heading up the slope of the hill, slowly, in the manner of a flâneur. Gabriel fell in beside him and together they wound their way through a labyrinth of darkened streets. Lavon never paused to take his bearings or consult a map. He was speaking in German about a discovery he’d made recently on a dig beneath the Old City of Jerusalem. When he wasn’t working for the Office, he served as an adjunct professor of biblical archaeology at Hebrew University. Indeed, owing to a monumental find he had made beneath the Temple Mount, Eli Lavon was regarded as Israel’s answer to Indiana Jones.

He stopped suddenly and asked, “Recognize it?”

“Recognize what?”

“This spot.” Greeted by silence, Lavon turned. “How about now?”

Gabriel turned, too. There were no lights burning anywhere in the street. The darkness had rendered the buildings shapeless, without character or detail.

“This is where they were standing.” Lavon walked a few paces up the cobbled street. “And the person who snapped the photograph was standing here.”

“I wonder who it was.”

“It could have been someone who passed in the street.”

“Quinn doesn’t strike me as the sort who would let a complete stranger take a photo of him.”

Lavon set off again without another word and climbed higher into the district. He made several more turns, left and right, until Gabriel had lost all sense of direction. His only point of orientation was the Tagus, which appeared sporadically through gaps in the buildings, its surface shining like the scales of a fish. Finally, Lavon slowed to a stop and nodded once toward the entrance of an apartment house. It was slightly taller than most buildings in the Bairro Alto, four floors instead of three, and defaced at street level by graffiti. A shutter on the second floor hung aslant on one hinge; a flowering vine dripped from the rusted balcony. Gabriel walked over to the doorway and inspected the intercom. The nameplate for 2B was empty. He placed his thumb atop the button and the buzzer sounded clearly, as if through an open window or walls of paper. Then he placed his hand lightly upon the latch.

“Do you know how long it would take me to open this?”

“About fifteen seconds,” answered Lavon. “But good things come to those who wait.”

Gabriel peered down the slope of the street. On the corner was a matchbox of a restaurant where Keller was indifferently studying the menu at a streetside table. Directly opposite the building was a pair of stubby sugar-cube dwellings, and a few paces farther along was another four-level apartment house with a facade the color of a canary. Taped to its entrance, curled like a cold cut left too long in the sun, was a flier explaining in Portuguese and English that an apartment in the building was available to let.

Gabriel tore away the flier and slipped it into his pocket. Then, with Lavon at his side, he walked past Keller without a word or glance and headed down the hill toward the river. In the morning, while taking coffee at Café Brasileira, he rang the number printed on the flier. And by midday, after paying six months’ rent and a security deposit in advance, the apartment was his.

24

BAIRRO ALTO, LISBON

GABRIEL MOVED INTO THE APARTMENT at dusk with the air of a man whose wife could no longer tolerate his company. He had no possessions other than a well-traveled overnight bag, and wore no expression other than a scowl that said he would prefer to be left to his own devices. Eli Lavon arrived an hour later bearing two bags of groceries—the makings, or so it seemed, of a meal of consolation. Keller came last. He stole into the building with the silence of a night thief and settled in front of a window as though he were digging into a hide in the Bandit Country of South Armagh. And thus commenced the long watch.

The apartment was furnished, but barely. The small gathering of mismatched chairs in the sitting room looked as if they had been acquired at a neighborhood flea market; the two bedrooms were like the cells of ascetic monks. The shortage of accommodations was of no consequence, for one man kept watch at the window always. Invariably, it was Keller. He had waited a long time for Quinn to rise from his cellar and wanted the honor of being the first to clap eyes upon the prize. Gabriel hung the composite sketch of Quinn on the wall like a family portrait, and Keller consulted it each time a man of appropriate age and height—mid-forties, perhaps five foot ten—passed in the narrow street. At sunrise on the third morning, he was convinced he saw Quinn approaching from the direction of the shuttered café. It was Quinn’s face, he told Lavon in an excited whisper. More important, he said, it was Quinn’s walk. But it wasn’t Quinn; it was a Portuguese man who, they discovered later, worked in a shop a few streets away. Lavon, a scholar of physical surveillance, explained that the mistake was one of the dangers of a long vigil. Sometimes the watcher sees what he wants to see. And sometimes the prize is standing right in front of him and the watcher is too blinded by fatigue or ambition to even realize it.

The landlord believed Gabriel to be the apartment’s sole occupant, so only Gabriel showed his face in public. He was a man with a damaged heart, a man with too much time on his hands. He wandered the hilly streets of the Bairro Alto, he rode trams seemingly without destination, he visited the Museu do Chiado, he took his afternoon coffee at Café Brasileira. And in a green park along the banks of the Tagus, he met an Office courier who gave him a case filled with the tools of a field outpost: a tripod-mounted camera with a night-vision telephoto lens, a parabolic microphone, secure radios, a concealable miniature transmitter, and a laptop computer with a secure satellite link to King Saul Boulevard. In addition, there was a note from the chief of Operations gently chiding Gabriel for acquiring a safe property on his own rather than through the auspices of Housekeeping. There was also a handwritten letter from Chiara. Gabriel read it twice before burning it in the bathroom sink. Afterward, his mood was as dark as the ashes he washed ritually down the drain.

“My offer still stands,” said Lavon.

“What’s that?”

“I’ll stay here with Keller. You go home to be with your wife.”

Gabriel’s answer was the same as before, and Lavon never raised the subject again—even late at night, when the tables of the corner restaurant had been packed away and rain baptized the silent street. They dimmed the lights of the apartment so their shadows would not be visible from without, and in the darkness the years faded from their faces. They might have been the same boys of twenty whom the Office had dispatched in the autumn of 1972 to hunt down the perpetrators of the Munich Olympics massacre. The operation had been code-named Wrath of God. In the Hebrew-based lexicon of the team, Lavon had been an ayin, a tracker. Gabriel was an aleph, an assassin. For three years they stalked their prey across Europe, killing in darkness and in broad daylight, living in fear that at any moment they might be arrested and charged as murderers. They had spent endless nights in shabby rooms watching doorways and men, secretly inhabiting the lives of others. Stress and visions of blood robbed them both of the ability to sleep. A transistor radio was their only link to the real world. It told them about wars won and lost, about an American president who resigned in disgrace, and sometimes, on warm summer nights, it played music for them—the same music that normal boys of twenty were listening to, boys who had not been sent forth by their country to serve as executioners, angels of vengeance for eleven murdered Jews.

Sleeplessness was soon epidemic in the little apartment in the Bairro Alto. They had planned to serve rotating two-hour shifts at the outpost by the window, but as the days wore on, and the mutual insomnia took hold, the three veteran operatives stood something like a joint permanent watch. All those who passed beneath their window were photographed, regardless of their age, gender, or national origin. Those who entered the target building received additional scrutiny, as did its residents. Gradually, their secrets came spilling into the observation post. Such was the nature of any long-term watch. More often than not, it was the venal sins of the innocent that were exposed.

The apartment contained a television with a satellite dish that lost hold of its signal each time rain fell from the sky or a modest exhalation of wind blew through the street. It served as their link to a world that with each passing day seemed to be spinning further out of control. It was the world Gabriel would inherit the moment he swore his oath as the next chief of the Office. And it would be Keller’s world, too, should he choose it. Keller was Gabriel’s last restoration. His dirty varnish had been removed, his canvas had been relined and retouched. He was no longer the English assassin. Soon he would be the English spy.

Like all good watchers, Keller was blessed with a natural forbearance. But seven days into the vigil, his patience abandoned him. Lavon suggested a walk along the river or a drive up the coast, anything to break the monotony of the watch, but Keller refused to leave the apartment or surrender his post in the window. He photographed the faces that passed beneath his feet—the old acquaintances, the new arrivals, the passersby—and he waited for a man in his mid-forties, approximately five feet ten inches in height, to alight at the entrance of the apartment house on the opposite side of the thin street. To Lavon, it seemed as if Keller were keeping watch on Lower Market Street in Omagh, waiting for a red Vauxhall Cavalier riding low on its rear axle to pull to the curb, waiting for two men, Quinn and Walsh, to climb out. Walsh had been punished for his sins. Quinn would be next.

But when another day passed with no sign of him, Keller suggested they take the search elsewhere. South America, he said, was the logical place. They could slip into Caracas and start kicking down doors until they found Quinn’s. Gabriel appeared to give the idea serious consideration. In reality, he was watching the woman of perhaps thirty sitting alone at the restaurant at the end of the street. She had placed her handbag on the chair next to her. It was a large handbag, large enough to accommodate toiletries, even a change of clothing. The zipper was open, and the bag was turned in a way that made the contents easily accessible. A female Office field agent would have left her bag in the same place, thought Gabriel, especially if the bag contained a gun.

“Are you listening to me?” asked Keller.

“Hanging on every word,” lied Gabriel.

The last light of dusk was fading; the woman of perhaps thirty was still wearing sunglasses. Gabriel trained the telephoto lens upon her face, zoomed in, and stole her photograph. He examined it carefully in the viewfinder of the camera. It was a good face, he thought, a face worthy of painting. The cheekbones were wide, the chin was small and delicate, the skin was flawless and white. The sunglasses rendered her eyes invisible, but Gabriel would have guessed they were blue. Her hair was shoulder length and very black. He doubted the color was natural.

At the moment Gabriel had taken her photograph, the woman had been looking at the menu. Now she was gazing up the length of the street. It was not the preferred view. Most patrons of the restaurant faced the opposite direction, which had a better vista of the city. A waiter appeared. Too late, Gabriel seized the parabolic microphone and trained it on the table. He heard the waiter say “Thank you” in English, followed by a burst of dance music. It was the ringer of her mobile. She dismissed the call with the press of a button, returned the phone to the handbag, and withdrew a Lisbon guidebook. Gabriel again placed his eye to the viewfinder and zoomed in, not on the woman’s face but on the guidebook she held in her hand. It was Frommer’s, English-language. She lowered it after a few seconds and resumed her study of the street.

“What are you looking at?” asked Keller.

“I’m not sure.”

Keller moved closer to the window and followed Gabriel’s gaze. “Pretty,” he said.

“Maybe.”

“Newcomer or habitué?”

“Tourist, apparently.”

“Why would a pretty young tourist eat alone?”

“Good question.”

The waiter reappeared bearing a glass of white wine, which he placed on the table next to the Lisbon guidebook. He opened his order pad, but the woman said something that made him withdraw without writing anything down. He returned a moment later with a check. He placed it on the table and departed. No words were exchanged.

“What just happened?” asked Keller.

“It seems the pretty young tourist had a change of heart.”

“I wonder why.”

“Maybe it had something to do with the phone call she didn’t pick up.”

The woman’s hand was now delving into the open handbag. When it reappeared, it was holding a single banknote. She placed it atop the check, weighted it with the wineglass, and rose.

“I guess she didn’t like it,” said Gabriel.

“Maybe she has a headache.”

The woman was now reaching for the bag. She placed the strap over her shoulder and took one final look up the length of the street. Then she turned in the opposite direction, rounded the corner, and was gone.

“Too bad,” said Keller.

“We’ll see,” said Gabriel.

He was watching the waiter collect the money. But in his thoughts he was calculating how long it would be before he saw her again. Two minutes, he reckoned; that’s how long it would take her to make her way back to her destination along a parallel street. He marked the time on his wristwatch, and when ninety seconds had passed he placed his eye to the viewfinder and began counting slowly. When he reached twenty, he saw her emerge from the half-light, the bag over her shoulder, the sunglasses over her eyes. She stopped at the entrance of the target building, inserted a key into the lock, and pushed open the door. As she entered the foyer, another tenant, a man in his mid-twenties, was coming out. He glanced over his shoulder at her; whether it was in admiration or curiosity, Gabriel could not tell. He snapped the tenant’s photograph, then looked toward the darkened windows on the second floor. Ten seconds later light blossomed behind the blinds.