The English Assassin

“I assure you, Signore Rossetti, that I will make every effort to avoid damaging them.”

The Italian smiled. “I trust that you will. Besides, can you imagine the curse that would befall a man who put a bullet hole through the Savior or the Virgin?”

The little jeweler made the sign of the cross, then turned and melted into the alley.

37

GABRIEL’S TEAM gathered that afternoon in the sitting room of A

There were Shimon and Ilana. Playing the parts of French newlyweds, they had driven to Venice from the Cote d’Azur. They were dark-eyed and olive-ski

There were Yitzhak and Moshe. In an accommodation to the realities of relationships in the modern world, they posed as a gay couple from Notting Hill, even though both were quite the other thing, Yitzhak aggressively so.

There was Deborah from the Ottawa station. Gabriel had worked with her on the Tariq operation and was so impressed with her performance that he had insisted she be a part of the Venice team. Shamron had balked at first, but when Gabriel refused to back down, he put her on the next plane from Ottawa and concocted a compelling lie for her section chief.

Seated next to her on the sofa, his leg hanging suggestively over the armrest, was Jonathan. Taciturn and bored, he had the air of a man kept waiting in a doctor’s office for a routine physical he did not need. He was a younger version of Gabriel-Gabriel before Vie

The session lasted one hour and fifteen minutes, though why Gabriel made a note of this fact he did not know. He had chosen to conduct that day’s run in Castello, the sestiere which lay just to the east of the Basilica San Marco and the Doge’s Palace. He had lived in Castello when he was serving his apprenticeship and knew the tangled streets well. Using a hotel pencil as a pointer, he plotted his route and choreographed the movements of the team.

To cover the sound of his instructions, he played a recording of German dances by Mozart. This seemed to darken Jonathan’s mood. Jonathan reviled all things German. Indeed, the only people he hated more than the Germans were the Swiss. During the war, his grandfather had tried to preserve his money and heirlooms by entrusting them to a Swiss banker. Fifty years later, Jonathan had tried to gain access to the account but was told by an officious clerk that the bank first required proof that Jonathan’s grandfather was indeed dead. Jonathan explained that his grandfather had been murdered at Treblinka-with gas manufactured by a Swiss chemical company, he had been tempted to say-and that the Nazis, while sticklers for paperwork, had not been thoughtful enough to provide a death certificate. Sorry, the clerk had said. No death certificate, no money.

When Gabriel finished his instructions, he opened a large stainless-steel suitcase and gave a secure cell phone and a nine-millimeter Beretta to each member of the team. When the guns were out of sight again, he walked upstairs, collected A

TEN minutes later, Gabriel and A

As Gabriel and A

A

A

They took a table at Caffé Florian beneath the shelter of the arcade. A quartet played Vivaldi rather poorly, which drove A

A

They remained in place while A

Five minutes later, Team Giorgione was drifting in formation over the Ponte della Paglia into the sestiere of Castello-first Shimon and Ilana, then Yitzhak and Moshe, then Gabriel and A