The Confessor

  “I can’t sleep with you there.”

  “You’ll sleep.”

  “Go into the other room.”

  “I’m not allowed to leave you.”

  Gabriel closed his eyes. The girl was right. After a few minutes, he slipped into unconsciousness. His sleep was aflame with nightmares. He fought the gun battle in the courtyard for a second time and saw carabinieri drenched in blood. Alessio Rossi appeared in his room, but in Gabriel’s dream he was dressed as a priest, and instead of a Beretta it was a crucifix he aimed at Gabriel’s head. Rossi’s death, with his arms flung wide and his side pierced by a bullet, Gabriel saw as a Caravaggio.

  Leah came to him. She stepped down from her altarpiece and shed her robes. Gabriel stroked her skin and found that her scars had been healed. Her mouth tasted of olives; her nipples, pressed against his chest, were firm and cool. She took him inside her body and brought him slowly to climax. As Gabriel released inside her, she asked him why he had fallen in love with Anna Rolfe. It’s you I love, Leah, he told her. It’s you I’ll always love.

  He awakened briefly; the dream was so real he expected to find Leah in the room with him. But when he opened his eyes, it was the face of Chiara he saw, sitting in her chair, watching over him, a gun in her hand.

  20

  ROME

  SHIMON PAZNER ARRIVED at the safe flat at eight o’clock the next morning. He was a squat and powerfully built man, with hair like steel wool and acne scars on his broad cheeks. Judging from his unshaven face and the red rims around his eyes, it was a safe assumption that he had not slept. Wordlessly he poured himself a cup of coffee and dropped the morning newspapers on the kitchen table. The shootout in the San Lorenzo Quarter was the lead of each paper. Gabriel, still groggy from the painkillers, looked down at them but was powerless to summon an expression.

  “You made quite a mess in my town.” Pazner tipped half a cup of coffee down his throat and pulled a face. “Imagine my surprise when I get the flash that the great Gabriel Allon is on the run and needs to be pulled in. You’d think someone at King Saul Boulevard would have the common sense to inform the local station chief when Gabriel Allon is in town to take someone down.”

  “I didn’t come to Rome to take anyone down.”

  “Bullshit!” Pazner snapped. “That’s what you do.”

  Pazner looked up as Chiara entered the kitchen. She wore a toweling robe. Her hair, still wet from the shower, was combed straight back. She poured herself some coffee and sat down next to Gabriel at the table.

  Pazner said, “Do you know what’s going to happen if the Italians ever figure out who you are? It will destroy our relationship. They’ll never work with us again.”

  “I know,” Gabriel said. “But I didn’t come here to kill anyone. They tried to kill me.”

  Pazner pulled out a chair and sat down, his thick forearms resting on the table. “What were you doing in Rome, Gabriel? And don’t bullshit me.”

  When Gabriel informed Pazner that he was in Rome on a job for Shamron, the station chief tilted his round head back and emptied his lungs toward the ceiling. “Shamron? That’s why no one at King Saul Boulevard knows what you’re working on. For Christ’s sake! I should have known the old man was behind this.”

  Gabriel pushed away the newspapers. He supposed he did owe Pazner an explanation. It had been reckless to come to Rome after the murder of Peter Malone. He’d underestimated the capabilities of his enemies and left Pazner with a colossal mess to clean up. He drank a cup of coffee to clear his head and told Pazner the story from the beginning. Chiara’s gaze remained fixed on him the entire time. Pazner managed to remain calm for the first half of Gabriel’s account, but by the end of the story he was smoking nervously.

  “Sounds as if they were following Rossi,” Pazner said. “And Rossi led them to you.”

  “He seemed to know he was under surveillance. He never left the window while he was in my room. He saw them coming for us, but it was too late.”

  “Was there anything in that room that could link you to the Office?”

  Gabriel shook his head, then asked Pazner whether he’d ever heard of a group called Crux Vera.

  “One hears all sorts of rumors about secret societies and Vatican intrigue in Italy,” Pazner said. “Remember the P2 scandal back in the eighties?”

  Vaguely, thought Gabriel. Quite by chance the Italian police had come across a document revealing the existence of a secret right-wing society that had wormed its way into the highest reaches of the government, military, and intelligence community. And the Vatican, apparently.

  “I’ve heard the name Crux Vera,” Pazner continued, “but I’ve never put much stock into it. Until now, that is.”

  “When do I get to leave?”

  “We’ll move you tonight.”

  “Where?”

  Pazner inclined his head toward the east, and by the look of finality in his dark eyes, it was clear to Gabriel that he was referring to Israel.

  “I don’t want to go to Israel. I want to find out who killed Benjamin.”

  “You can’t move anywhere in Europe now. You’re blown. You’re going home—period. Shamron isn’t the chief anymore. Lev is the chief, and he’s not going to be brought down by one of the old man’s adventures.”

  “How are you going to get me out of the country?”

  “The same way we got Vanunu out. By boat.”

  “If I remember correctly, that was one of Shamron’s adventures too.”

  Mordechai Vanunu had been a disgruntled worker at the Dimona atomic facility who revealed the existence of Israel’s nuclear arsenal to a London newspaper. A female agent named Cheryl Ben-Tov lured Vanunu from London to Rome, where he was kidnapped and taken by small boat to an Israeli naval vessel lying in wait off the Italian coast. Few people outside the Office knew the truth about the episode: that Vanunu’s defection and betrayal of Israeli secrets had been choreographed and manipulated by Ari Shamron as a way to warn Israel’s enemies that they had no hope of ever bridging the nuclear gap, while at the same time leaving Israel with the ability to deny publicly that it possessed nuclear weapons.

  “Vanunu left Italy in chains and under heavy sedation,” Pazner said. “You’ll be spared that indignity as long as you behave yourself.”

  “Where do we set sail?”

  “There’s a beach near Fiumicino that’s perfect. You’ll take a motor launch from there at nine o’clock. Five miles offshore, you’ll meet an oceangoing motor yacht, crew of one. He’s Office now, but for many years he captained a navy gunboat. He’ll take you back to Tel Aviv. A few days at sea will be good for you.”

  “Who’s taking me to the yacht?”

  Pazner looked at Chiara. “She grew up in Venice. She’s damned good with a boat.”

  “She does handle a motorcycle well,” Gabriel said.

  Pazner leaned forward across the table. “You should see her with a Beretta.”

  ERIC LANGE arrived at Fiumicino airport at nine o’clock that morning. After clearing customs and passport control, he spotted Rashid Husseini’s man standing in the terminal hall, clutching a brown cardboard sign that read TRANSEURO TECHNOLOGIES—MR. BOWMAN. He had a car waiting outside in the covered parking lot, a battered beige Lancia that he piloted with unwarranted caution. He called himself Aziz and spoke English with a faint British accent. Like Husseini, he had the air of an academic.

  He drove to a faded apartment house at the base of the Aventine Hill and led Lange up a crumbling staircase that spiraled upward into the gloom. The flat was empty of furniture except for a television connected to a satellite dish on the tiny balcony. Aziz gave Lange a gun, a Makarov nine-millimeter with a silencer screwed into the barrel, then brewed Turkish coffee in the galley kitchen. They spent the next three hours sitting cross-legged on the floor like Bedouins, drinking coffee and watching the war in the territories on al-Jazeera television. The Palestinian chain-smoked American cigarettes. With each televised outrage he let loose a str
ing of Arabic curses.

  At two in the afternoon, he went downstairs to fetch bread and cheese from the grocer. He returned to discover Lange enthralled by a cooking program on an American cable channel. He brewed more coffee and changed the channel back to al-Jazeera without asking Lange’s permission. Lange ate a bit of lunch, then made a pillow of his overcoat and stretched out on the bare floor for a nap. He was awakened by the purr of Aziz’s cellular telephone. He opened his eyes to find the Arab listening intently and scribbling a note on a paper sack.

  Aziz rang off and his gaze was drawn back to the television. An anchorman was offering breathless narration to a piece of video depicting Israeli soldiers firing into a crowd of Palestinian boys.

  Aziz lit another cigarette and looked at Lange.

  “Let’s go kill the bastard.”

  BY SUNSET, Gabriel’s wound hurt less and his appetite had returned. Chiara cooked fettuccini with mushrooms and cream, and they watched the evening news. The first ten minutes of the broadcast was devoted to the search for the papal assassin. Over video of heavily armed Italian security forces patrolling the nation’s airports and borders, the correspondent described it as one of the largest manhunts in Italian history. When Gabriel’s photograph appeared on the screen, Chiara squeezed his hand.

  After supper, she put a clean dressing on his wound and gave him another shot of antibiotics. When she offered Gabriel something for the pain, he refused. At six-thirty they changed clothes. The forecast was for rain and rough seas, and they dressed appropriately: fleece underwear, waterproof outerwear, rubber boots over insulated socks. Pazner had left Gabriel a false Canadian passport and a Beretta nine-millimeter. Gabriel hid the passport in a zippered compartment of his coat and slipped the Beretta into a patch pocket within easy reach.

  Pazner arrived at six o’clock. His thick face was set in a furrowed scowl and his movements were crisp and precise. Over a last cup of coffee, he calmly briefed them. Getting out of Rome would be the most dangerous part of the escape, he explained. The police had mounted rolling checkpoints and were making random stops all over the city. His businesslike demeanor helped to settle Gabriel’s nerves.

  At seven o’clock they left the flat. Pazner made a point of speaking a few words in excellent Italian during the descent down the staircase. Parked in the courtyard was a dark gray Volkswagen delivery van. Pazner climbed into the front passenger seat; Gabriel and Chiara clambered through the side door into the cargo hold. The floor was cold to the touch. The driver started the engine and switched on the wipers. He wore a blue anorak, and the pale hands gripping the steering wheel were the hands of a pianist. Pazner called him Reuven.

  The van jerked forward and passed through the arched entrance of the courtyard, then turned right and accelerated into traffic. Sprawled on the floor of the van, Gabriel could see nothing but the night sky and the reflections of passing headlights. He knew they were heading west. To avoid the checkpoints on Rome’s main thoroughfares and the autostrada, Pazner had charted a course to the sea consisting of side streets and back roads.

  Gabriel looked toward Chiara and found that she was staring at him. He tried to hold her gaze, but she looked away. He leaned his head against the wall and closed his eyes.

  AZIZ HAD brought Lange up to date during the brief drive from the Aventine Hill to the old palazzo high atop the Janiculum. For several years, Palestinian intelligence had been aware that Shimon Pazner was an agent of the Israeli secret service. They had followed him from posting to posting, charted the course of his career. In Rome, where he was assumed to be the chief of station, he was under regular surveillance. Twice that day—once in the early morning and again in the late afternoon—Pazner had visited a flat in a converted palazzo on the Janiculum. PLO intelligence had long suspected that the property was an Israeli safe flat. The case was circumstantial, the connections tenuous, but given the circumstances, the chances seemed reasonable that Gabriel Allon, the killer of Abu Jihad, was inside.

  Parked on the street, one hundred meters from the entrance of the old palazzo, Lange and Aziz had watched and waited. There were lights burning in only two of the flats facing the street, one on the second floor and the other on the top. In that flat, the shades were tightly drawn. Lange took note of the arriving tenants: a pair of boys on a motorino; a woman in a miniature two-seater Fiat; a middle-aged man in a belted raincoat who came by way of a city bus. A dark gray Volkswagen delivery van, one man in the front, dressed in a blue windbreaker, that turned into the central courtyard.

  Lange consulted his watch.

  Ten minutes later, the van poked from the entrance of the courtyard and turned into the street. As it sped past their position, Lange noticed that there was now a second man in the front seat. He spurred Aziz into action with a sharp elbow to the ribs. The Palestinian started the engine, waited a decent interval, then swung a U-turn and followed after the van.

  FIVE MINUTES after they had left the safe flat, Shimon Pazner’s cellular phone rang. He had taken the precaution of a chase car, a second team of agents whose job it was to make certain that the van was not being followed. A call from the team at this stage could mean one of two things. No sign of surveillance, proceed to the beach as scheduled. Or: trouble, take evasive action.

  Pazner pressed the call button and raised the phone to his ear. He listened in silence for a moment, then murmured, “Take them out the first chance you get.”

  He punched the END button and looked at the driver. “We’ve got company, Reuven. Beige Lancia, two cars back.”

  The driver put his foot to the floor, and the van shot forward. Gabriel reached into his pocket and wrapped his hand around the comforting shape of the Beretta.

  FOR LANGE, the rapid acceleration of the van provided confirmation that Gabriel Allon was inside. It also meant that they had been spotted, that the element of surprise had been lost, and that killing Allon would entail a high-speed chase followed by a shootout, something that violated nearly all of Lange’s operational tenets. He killed by stealth and surprise, appearing where he was least expected and slipping quietly away. Gun battles were for commandos and desperados, not professional assassins. Still, he was loath to let Allon escape so easily. Reluctantly, he ordered Aziz to take up the chase. The Palestinian downshifted and pressed hard on the accelerator, trying to maintain contact.

  Two minutes later, the interior of the Lancia was suddenly filled with blinding halogen light. Lange shot a look over his shoulder and saw the distinctive headlights of a Mercedes, a few inches from the rear bumper. The Mercedes moved left, so that its right front bumper was aligned with the left rear bumper of the Lancia.

  Lange braced himself against the dash. The Mercedes accelerated hard, closing the gap between the two cars. The Lancia shuddered with the impact, then went into a violent clockwise spin. Aziz shouted and clung desperately to the wheel. Lange grabbed the armrest and waited for the car to roll.

  It never did. After what seemed like an eternity, the Lancia came to a stop, facing the opposite direction. Lange turned around and glanced through the rear window in time to see the van and the Mercedes disappear below the crest of a hill.

  NINETY MINUTES later, the van rolled to a stop in a car park overlooking a windswept beach. The labored howl of a jumbo jet sinking out of the black sky provided proof that they were near the end of Fiumicino’s busy runway. Chiara climbed out and walked down to the water’s edge to see if it was clear. The van shuddered in the wind gusts. Two minutes later, she poked her head through the doors and nodded. Pazner shook Gabriel’s hand and wished him luck. Then he looked at Chiara. “We’ll wait here. Hurry.”

  Gabriel followed her along the rocky beach. They came to the boat, a ten-foot Zodiac, and dragged it into the frigid surf. The engine started without hesitation. Chiara guided the boat expertly out to sea, the stubby prow bucking over the wind-driven surf, while Gabriel watched the shoreline falling away and the coastal lights growing dim. Italy, a country he loved, a place that had
given him peace after the Wrath of God operation. He wondered whether he would ever be allowed to go back again.

  Chiara removed a radio from her jacket pocket, murmured a few words into the microphone, and released the TALK button. A moment later, the running lights of a motor yacht flickered on. “There,” she said, pointing off the starboard side. “There’s your ride home.”

  She changed the heading and opened the throttle, racing across the whitecaps toward the waiting vessel. Fifty yards from the yacht, she killed the engine and glided silently toward the stern. Then, for the first time, she looked at Gabriel.

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m coming with you,” she repeated deliberately.

  “I’m going to Israel.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re going to Provence to find the daughter of Regina Carcassi. And I’m going with you.”

  “You’re going to put me on that yacht, and then you’re going to turn around.”

  “Even with that Canadian passport, you can’t go anywhere in Europe right now. You can’t rent a car, you can’t get on an airplane. You need me. And what if Pazner was lying? What if there are two men on that boat instead of just one?”

  Gabriel had to admit she had point.

  “You’re a fool to do this, Chiara. You’ll destroy your career.”

  “No, I won’t,” she said. “I’ll tell them that you forced me to accompany you against my will.”

  Gabriel looked up at the motor yacht. It was growing larger by degrees. Honor was due. Chiara had picked the perfect time to spring her trap.