Eamonn Dillon of Sinn Fein was the first to die, and he died because he planned to stop for a pint of lager at the Celtic Bar before heading up the Falls Road to a meeting in Andersontown. Twenty minutes before Dillon’s death, a short distance to the east, his killer hurried along the pavements of Belfast city center through a cold rain. He wore a dark green oilskin coat with a brown corduroy collar. His code name was Black Sheep.

The air smelled of the sea and faintly of the rusting shipyards of Belfast Lough. It was just after 4 p.m. but already dark. Night falls early on a winter’s night in Belfast; morning dawns slowly. The city center was bathed in yellow sodium light, but Black Sheep knew that West Belfast, his destination, would feel like the wartime blackout.

He continued north up Great Victoria Street, past the curious fusion of old and new that makes up the face of central Belfast—the constant reminders that these few blocks have been bombed and rebuilt countless times. He passed the shining façade of the Europa, infamous for being the most bombed hotel on the planet. He passed the new opera house and wondered why anyone in Belfast would want to listen to the music of someone else’s tragedy. He passed a hideous American doughnut shop filled with laughing Protestant schoolchildren in crested blazers. I do this for you, he told himself. I do this so you won’t have to live in an Ulster dominated by the fucking Catholics.

The larger buildings of the city center receded, and the pavements slowly emptied of other pedestrians until he was quite alone. He walked for about a quarter mile and crossed over theM1 motorway near the towering Divis Flats. The overpass was scrawled with graffiti: vote sinn fein; british troops out of northern ireland; release all pows. Even if Black Sheep had known nothing of the city’s complex sectarian geography, which was certainly not the case, the signs were impossible to miss. He had just crossed the frontier into enemy territory—Catholic West Belfast.

The Falls spreads west like a fan, narrow at its mouth near the city center, broad to the west, beneath the shadow of Black Mountain. The Falls Road—simply “the road” in the lexicon of Catholic West Belfast—cuts through the neighborhood like a river, with tributaries leading into the thickets of terraced houses where British soldiers and Roman Catholics have engaged in urban guerrilla warfare for three decades. The commercial center of the Falls is the intersection of the Springfield Road and the Grosvenor Road. There are markets, clothing shops, hardware stores, and pubs. Taxis filled with passengers shuttle up and down the street. It looks much like any other working-class neighborhood in a British city, except the doorways are encased in black steel cages and the taxis never stray from the Falls Road because of Protestant killer squads. The dilapidated white terraces of the Ballymurphy housing estate dominate the western edge of the Falls. Ballymurphy is the ideological heartland of West Belfast, and over the years it has supplied a steady stream of recruits to the IRA. Bellicose murals stare over the Whiterock Road toward the rolling green hills of the city cemetery, where many of Ballymurphy’s men are buried beneath simple headstones. To the north, across the Springfield Road, a giant army barracks and police station stands like a besieged fortress in enemy territory, which indeed it is.

Strangers aren’t welcome in the Murph, even Catholic strangers. British soldiers don’t set foot there without their giant armored personnel carriers called saracens—”pigs” to the people of Ballymurphy.

Black Sheep had no intention of going anywhere near Ballymurphy. His destination was farther to the east—the headquarters of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, located at No. 51-55 Falls Road. As he moved deeper into the Falls, the spires of St. Peter’s Cathedral rose to his left. A trio of British soldiers drifted across the ugly asphalt square in front of the cathedral, now pausing to peer through the infrared sights of their rifles, now spinning on their heels to see if anyone was following them. Don’t speak to them, his handlers had told him. Don’t even look at them. If you look at them, they’ll know you’re an outsider. Black Sheep kept his hands in his pockets and his gaze on the pavement in front of him.

He turned into Dunville Park and sat down on a bench. Despite the rain, schoolboys played football in the weak light of the streetlamps. A group of women—mothers and older sisters, by the look of them—watched carefully from the imaginary sidelines. A pair of British soldiers strode through the middle of the game, but the boys played around them as though they were invisible. Black Sheep reached in his coat pocket and withdrew his cigarettes, a ten-pack of Benson & Hedges, perfect for the perpetually tight budgets of working-class West Belfast. He lit one and returned the cigarettes to his pocket. His hand brushed against the butt of a Walther automatic.

From his vantage point on the bench the man could see the Falls Road perfectly: Sinn Fein headquarters, where the target worked each day; the Celtic Bar, where he drank in the late afternoon.

Dillon’s speaking to a community meeting in Andersontown at five o’clock, Black Sheep’s handlers had told him. That means he’s on a tight schedule. He’ll leave headquarters at four-thirty and walk over to the Celtic for a quick one.

The door of Sinn Fein headquarters swung open. For an instant the interior lights spilled onto the rainy pavement. Black Sheep spotted his target, Eamonn Dillon, the third-ranking officer of Sinn Fein, behind only Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, and a member of the negotiating team for the peace talks. And a dedicated family man as well, with a wife and two sons, Black Sheep thought. He pushed the image from his mind. No time for that now. One bodyguard accompanied Dillon. The door closed again, and the two men moved west along the Falls Road.

Black Sheep tossed his cigarette onto the ground and walked across the park. He climbed a short set of steps and stood at the intersection of the Falls Road and the Grosvenor Road. He pressed the button for the crossing and calmly waited for the light to turn from red to green. Dillon and his bodyguard were still about a hundred yards from the Celtic. The light changed. There were no British soldiers on the Falls Road, just the pair standing near the football match down in the park. When he reached the other side of the road Black Sheep turned and walked east, placing himself on a collision course with Dillon and the bodyguard.

He moved quickly now, head down, right hand wrapped around the butt of the Walther. He glanced up, checked Dillon’s position, and looked down again. Thirty yards, thirty-five at most. He released the safety on the Walther. He thought of the Protestant children eating doughnuts in Great Victoria Street.

I do this for you. I do this for God and Ulster.
He withdrew the Walther and aimed it at the bodyguard, pulling the trigger twice before the man could release his own weapon from a shoulder holster beneath his raincoat. The shots struck him in the upper chest, and he collapsed onto the wet pavement.

Black Sheep swung his arm and pointed the gun at Eamonn Dillon’s face. He hesitated, just for an instant. He couldn’t do it, not in the face. He lowered the gun and pulled the trigger twice.

The shots pierced Dillon’s heart.
He fell backward onto the pavement, one arm strewn across the bloody chest of his bodyguard. Black Sheep pressed the barrel of his Walther against the side of Dillon’s head and fired one last shot.

The second act was unfolding at precisely the same moment, one hundred miles to the south, in Dublin, where a small man limped along a footpath in St. Stephen’s Green through a steady rain. His code name was Master. He might have been mistaken for a student at nearby Trinity College, which was his intention. He wore a tweed jacket, collar up, and corduroy trousers shiny with wear. He had the dark eyes and the unkempt beard of a devout Muslim, which he was not. In his right hand he carried a boxy briefcase, so old it smelled of damp rather than leather.

He entered Kildare Street and passed the entrance of the Shelbourne Hotel, adorned with statues of Nubian princesses and their slaves. He lowered his head as he slipped through a knot of tourists heading to tea in the Lord Mayor’s Lounge.

By the time he reached Molesworth Street it was nearly impossible to pretend the briefcase hanging from his right arm was not abnormally heavy. The muscles of his shoulder burned, and he could feel dampness beneath his arms. The National Library loomed before him. He hurried inside and crossed the front entrance hall, passing a display of George Bernard Shaw’s manuscripts. He switched the briefcase from his right hand to his left and approached the attendant.

“I’d like a pass for the reading room,” he said, carefully replacing his hard-edged West Belfast accent with the softer lilt of the south. The attendant handed him a pass without looking up.

Master took the stairs to the third floor, entered the famous reading room, and found an empty spot next to a fussy-looking man who smelled of mothballs and linseed oil. He opened a side flap on the briefcase, withdrew a thin volume of Gaelic poetry, and placed it softly on the leather-topped desk. He turned on the green-shaded lamp. The fussy-looking man glanced up, pulled a frown, and returned to his own work.

For several minutes Master pretended to be engrossed in his poetry, yet all the while his instructions buzzed through his mind like annoying recorded announcements in a rail terminal. The timer is set for five minutes, his handler had said during the final briefing. Enough time for you to get clear of the library, not enough time for security to do anything if the briefcase is discovered.

He kept his head down, gaze fastened on the text. Every few minutes he would lift his hand and scribble a few notes in a small spiral-bound notebook. He heard soft footfalls around him, pages turning, pencils scratching, discreet sniffles and coughs, by-products of the eternal damp of the Dublin winter. He resisted the impulse to look at them. He wanted them to remain anonymous, faceless. He had no quarrel with the Irish people, only the Irish government. He took no pleasure at the thought of shedding innocent blood.

He glanced at his wristwatch—4:45 p.m. He reached down beneath his legs on the pretense of withdrawing a second volume of poetry, but once his hand was inside the musty old briefcase it lingered for a second or two longer, searching for the small plastic trigger that would arm the detonator. He gently threw the switch, holding it carefully between his thumb and forefinger to dampen the click. He removed his hand and placed the second volume, unopened, next to the first. He glanced at his watch, a stainless steel analog model with a sweep-second hand, and carefully noted the time he had set the detonator.

He turned and looked at the fussy man at the next desk, who was glaring back at him as though he had been doing calisthenics. “Can you tell me where the toilet is?” Master whispered.
“What?” the fussy-looking man said, bending his crimson ear with the end of a gnawed yellow pencil.
“The toilet,” the man repeated, slightly louder this time, though still whispering.
The man removed the pencil from his ear, frowned again, and pointed the tip toward the doorway at the far end of the room.

Master glanced at his watch as he walked across the room. Forty seconds gone. He quickened his pace, making for the doorway, but five seconds later he heard an ear-shattering sound, like a thunderclap, and felt a hot blast of air lift him from his feet and hurtle him across the great room like a dead leaf caught in an autumn gale.In London, a tall woman wearing blue jeans, hiking boots, and a black leather jacket was picking her way through the crowded pavements along the Brompton Road. Behind her she pulled a rolling suitcase of black nylon with a retractable handle. Her code name was Dame.

The rains over Belfast and Scotland had yet to reach the south, and the late-afternoon sky was clear and blustery: pink and orange in the west toward Notting Hill and Kensington, blue-black to the east over the City. The air was unseasonably warm and heavy. Dame walked quickly past the glittering windows of Harrods and waited with a cluster of other pedestrians at Hans Crescent.

She crossed the small street when the light changed, slicing her way through a horde of Japanese tourists bound for Harrods, and came to the Knightsbridge entrance of the Underground. She hesitated for an instant, peering down the short flight of tiled steps leading to the ticket hall. She started down the steps, pulling the bag behind her until it rolled off the first step and crashed down to the next with a heavy thud.

She had negotiated two more steps in this manner when a young man with thinning blond hair approached. He smiled flirtatiously and said, “Please, let me help you with that.”
The accent was middle European or Scandinavian: German or Dutch, or maybe Danish. She hesitated. Should she accept help from a stranger? Would it be more suspicious to refuse?

“Thanks a lot,” she said finally. The accent was American, flat and toneless. She had lived in New York many months and could shed her Ulster accent at will. “That would be great.”
He grasped the bag by the grip and lifted it.
“My God, what have you got in here, rocks?”
“Stolen gold bars, actually,” she said, and they both laughed.

He carried the bag down the steps and placed it on the ground. She took the bag by the pull handle, said, “Thanks again,” and turned and started walking. She could feel his presence just behind her. She increased her pace, conspicuously glancing at her wristwatch, to signal she was running late. She reached the ticket lobby and found an empty automatic dispenser. She fed ú3.30 into the slot and pressed the corresponding button. Her European helper appeared alongside and slipped a few coins into his machine without looking at her. He purchased a ticket for ú1.10, which meant he was making a short journey, probably somewhere within central London. He collected his ticket and melted into the rush-hour crowd.

She passed through the turnstiles and took the long escalator down to the platform. A moment later she felt a breath of wind and heard the rush of the approaching train. Miraculously, there were a few empty seats. She left the bag next to the door and sat down. By the time the train reached Earl’s Court, the carriage had filled with passengers, and Dame had lost sight of the bag. The train surfaced and sped through London’s western suburbs. Tired commuters trickled from the train onto the windswept platforms of Boston Manor, Osterley, and Hounslow East.

As the train approached the first stop at Heathrow—the platform serving Terminal Four—Dame looked at the passengers seated around her. A pair of young English businessmen who stank of prosperity, a knot of sullen German tourists, a foursome of Americans loudly debating whether London’s production of Miss Saigon was superior to Broadway’s. Dame looked away.

The plan was simple. She had been instructed to get off at Terminal Four and leave the bag behind. Before stepping from the train she would press the button on a small transmitter hidden in her coat pocket. The transmitter, disguised as a keyless remote for a Japanese luxury car, would arm the detonator. If the train continued on schedule, the bomb would explode a few seconds after it reached the platform serving terminals One, Two, and Three. The resulting damage would inconvenience travelers for months and cost hundreds of millions of pounds to repair.

The train slowed as it approached the stop for Terminal Four. The woman stood and moved to the doors as the black of the tunnel gave way to the severe light of the platform. When the doors opened she pressed the button on the transmitter, arming the bomb. She stepped onto the platform, and the doors closed behind her. She began walking quickly toward the way out. It was then that she heard pounding on the window of the train. She turned and saw one of the young English businessmen beating his fist against the glass. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but she could read his lips. Your bag! he was shouting. You left your bag!

Dame made no movement. The expression on the Englishman’s face abruptly turned from mild concern to complete terror as he realized the woman had left the bag intentionally. He lunged toward the doors and tried to pry them open with his hands. Even if the man had managed to arouse attention and stop the train, nothing could be done in one minute and fifteen seconds to prevent the bomb from exploding.

Dame watched as the train slipped forward. She was turning away when, a few seconds later, the tunnel shook with an enormous blast. The train lifted from the tracks, and a wave of searing air rushed over her. Dame instinctively raised her hands to her face. Above her, the ceiling began to crumble. The concussion of the blast lifted her from her feet. She saw it all terribly clearly for an instant—the fire, the crumbling cement, the human beings, like her, caught in the fiery maelstrom of the explosion.

It ended very quickly. She was not certain how she came to rest; she had lost all sense of up and down, rather like a diver too long beneath the surface. All she knew was that she was entombed in debris, and she could not breathe or feel any part of her body. She tried to speak but could utter no sound. Her mouth began filling with her own blood.

Her thoughts remained clear. She wondered how the bomb makers could have made such a mistake, and then, in the final moments before her death, she wondered whether it was really a mistake at all.

Each plot-twisting segment is marked by almost unbearable tension… Silva unsmiling prose urges you on like a silencer poking at the small of your back.”
—Entertainment Weekly

The Marching Season has more twists and turns than a bowl of Rigatoni… Starting with a bang and escalating from there, Silva’s latest has everything you would expect from a thriller.”
—The Rocky Mountain News

Silva continues the unique blend of fact and fiction that gives is stories the immediate and urgency of the evening news… With The Marching Season, Daniel Silva confirms his position as a front-runner to succeed Tom Clancy as America’s foremost source of international intrigue fiction.”
—Bookpage

By coincidence Timothy Peel arrived in the village the same week in July as the stranger. He and his mother moved into a ramshackle cottage at the head of the tidal creek with her latest lover, a struggling playwright named Derek, who drank too much wine and detested children. The stranger arrived two days later, settling into the old foreman’s cottage just up the creek from the oyster farm.

Peel had little to do that summer – when Derek and his mother weren’t making clamorous love, they were taking inspirational forced marches along the cliffs – so he determined to find out exactly who the stranger was and what he was doing in Cornwall. Peel decided the best way to begin was to watch. Because he was eleven, and the only child of divorced parents, Peel was well schooled in the art of human observation and investigation. Like any good surveillance artist, he required a fixed post. He settled on his bedroom window, which had an unobstructed view over the creek. In the storage shed he found a pair of ancient Zeiss binoculars, and at the village store he purchased a small notebook and ballpoint pen for recording his watch report.

The first thing Peel noticed was that the stranger liked old objects. His car was a vintage MG roadster. Peel would watch from his window as the man hunched over the motor for hours at a time, his back poking from beneath the bonnet. A man of great concentration, Peel concluded. A man of great mental endurance.

After a month the stranger vanished. A few days passed, then a week, then a fortnight. Peel feared the stranger had spotted him and taken flight. Bored senseless without the routine of watching, Peel got into trouble. He was caught hurling a rock though the window of a tea shop in the village. Derek sentenced him to a week of solitary confinement in his bedroom.

But that evening Peel managed to slip out with his binoculars. He walked along the quay, past the stranger’s darkened cottage and the oyster farm, and stood at the point where the creek fed into the Helford River, watching the sailboats coming in with the tide. He spotted a ketch heading in under power. He raised the binoculars to his eyes and studied the figure standing at the wheel.

The stranger had come back to Port Navas.

The ketch was old and badly in need of restoration, and the stranger cared for it with the same devotion he had shown his fickle MG. He toiled for several hours each day: sanding, varnishing, painting, polishing brass, changing lines and canvas. When the weather was warm he would strip to the waist. Peel couldn’t help but compare the stranger’s body with Derek’s. Derek was soft and flabby; the stranger was compact and very hard, the kind of man you would quickly regret picking a fight with. By the end of August his skin had turned nearly as dark as the varnish he was so meticulously applying to the deck of the ketch.

He would disappear aboard the boat for days at a time. Peel had no way to follow him. He could only imagine where the stranger was going. Down the Helford to the sea? Around the Lizard to St. Michael’s Mount or Penzance? Maybe around the cape to St. Ives.

Then Peel hit upon another possibility. Cornwall was famous for its pirates; indeed, the region still had its fair share of smugglers. Perhaps the stranger was running the ketch out to sea to meet cargo vessels and ferry contraband to shore.

The next time the stranger returned from one of his voyages, Peel stood a strict watch in his window, hoping to catch him in the act of removing contraband from the boat. But as he leaped from the prow of the ketch onto the quay, he had nothing in his hands but a canvas rucksack and plastic rubbish bag.

The stranger sailed for pleasure, not profit.

Peel took out his notebook and drew a line through the word smuggler.

The large parcel arrived the first week of September, a flat wooden crate, nearly as big as a barn door. It came in a van from London, accompanied by an agitated man in pinstripes. The stranger’s days immediately assumed a reverse rhythm. At night the top floor of the cottage burned with light – not normal light, Peel observed, but a very clear white light. In the mornings, when Peel left home for school, he would see the stranger heading down the creek in the ketch, or working on his MG, or setting off in a pair of battered hiking boots to pound the footpaths of the Helford Passage. Peel supposed he slept afternoons, though he seemed like a man who could go a long time without rest.

Peel wondered what the stranger was doing all night. Late one evening he decided to have a closer look. He pulled on a sweater and coat and slipped out of the cottage without telling his mother. He stood on the quay. looking up at the stranger’s cottage. The windows were open; a sharp odor hung on the air, something between rubbing alcohol and petrol. He could also hear music of some sort – singing, opera perhaps.

The tragedy of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and despair of its resolution provide the backdrop for Silva’s heart-stopping, complex yarn of international terrorism and intrigue…. An array of global locales adds to the complexity and authenticity of the dizzying, cinematic plot.”
—Publishers Weekly

Although the novel moves at a really fast clip, cutting from location to location, Silva avoids the espionage novelist’s sin of glossy locales and comic-book action by giving his characters, even the minor ones, believably complex motivations that come into play in the thriller’s overriding conflict. Part of the interest of Silva’s work is the way he portrays various professions (here it’s art dealership, publishing, and modeling) to be every bit as cutthroat as international intrigue.”
—Booklist

A master writer of espionage … [Silva’s] writing is clean, crisp, and compelling.”
—Cincinnati Enquirer

[A] thrill-a-minute sure-fire bestseller [that] rips Middle East strife from the headlines.”
—Kirkus Reviews

http://fabcare.com/tag/complete/ Switzerland 1975

Marguerite Rolfe was digging in her garden because of the secrets she’d found hidden in her husband’s study. It was late to be working in the garden, well past midnight by now. The spring thaw had left the earth soft and moist, and her spade split the soil with little effort, allowing her to progress with minimal noise. For this she was grateful. Her husband and daughter were asleep in the villa, and she didn’t want to wake them.

Why couldn’t it have been something simple, like love letters from another woman? There would have been a good row, Marguerite would have confessed her own affair. Lovers would have been relinquished, and soon their home would return to normal. But she hadn’t found love letters-she’d found something much worse.

For a moment she blamed herself. If she hadn’t been searching his study, she never would have found the photographs. She could have spent the rest of her life in blissful oblivion, believing her husband was the man he appeared to be. But now she knew. Her husband was a monster, his life a lie-a complete and meticulously maintained lie. Therefore she too was a lie.

Marguerite Rolfe concentrated on her work, making slow and steady progress. After an hour it was done. A good hole, she decided: about six feet in length and two feet across. Six inches below the surface she had encountered a dense layer of clay. As a result it was a bit shallower than she would have preferred. It didn’t matter. She knew it wasn’t permanent.

She picked up the gun. It was her husband’s favorite weapon, a beautiful shotgun, hand-crafted for him by a master gunsmith in Milan. He would never be able to use it again. This pleased her. She thought of Anna. Please don’t wake up, Anna. Sleep, my love.

Then she stepped into the ditch, lay down on her back, placed the end of the barrel in her mouth, pulled the trigger.

The girl was awakened by music. She did not recognize the piece and wondered how it had found its way into her head. It lingered a moment, a descending series of notes, a serene diminishment. She reached out, eyes still closed, and searched the folds of the bedding until her palm found the body which lay a few inches away. Her fingers slipped over the narrow waist, up the slender, elegant neck, toward the graceful curved features of the scroll. Last night they had quarreled. Now it was time to set aside their differences and make peace.

She eased from the bed, pulled on a dressing gown. Five hours of practice stretched before her. Thirteen years old, a sun-drenched June morning, and this was how she would spend her day-and every other day that summer.

Stretching the muscles of her neck, she gazed out the window at the flowering garden. It was a melee of spring color. Beyond the garden rose the steep slope of the valley wall. High above it all loomed the snow-capped mountain peaks, glittering in the bright summer sun. She pressed her violin to her neck and prepared to play the first Ètude.

Then she noticed something in the garden: a mound of dirt, a long shallow hole. From her vantage point in the window she could see a swath of white fabric stretched across the bottom and pale hands wrapped around the barrel of a gun.

“Mama!” she screamed, and the violin crashed to the floor.

She threw open the door to her father’s study without knocking. She had expected to find him at his desk, hunched over his ledgers, but instead he was perched on the edge of a high-backed wing chair, next to the fireplace. A tiny, elfin figure, he wore his habitual blue blazer and striped tie. He was not alone. The second man wore sunglasses in spite of the masculine gloom of the study.

“What on earth do you think you’re doing?” snapped her father. “How many times have I asked you to respect my closed door? Can’t you see I’m in the middle of an important discussion?”

“But Papa-”

“And put on some proper clothing! Ten o’clock in the morning and you’re still wearing only a housecoat.”

“Papa, I must-”

“It can wait until I’ve finished.”

“No, it can’t, Papa!”

She screamed this so loudly the man in sunglasses flinched.

“I apologize, Otto, but I’m afraid my daughter’s manners have suffered from spending too many hours alone with her instrument. Will you excuse me? I won’t be but a moment.”

Anna Rolfe’s father handled important documents with care, and the note he removed from the grave was no exception. When he finished reading it, he looked up sharply, his gaze flickering from side to side, as if he feared someone was reading over his shoulder. This Anna saw from her bedroom window.

As he turned and started back toward the villa, he glanced up at the window and his eyes met Anna’s. He paused, holding her gaze for a moment. It was not a gaze of sympathy. Or remorse. It was a gaze of suspicion.

She turned from the window. The Stradivarius lay where she had dropped it. She picked it up. Downstairs she heard her father calmly telling his guest of his wife’s suicide. She lifted the violin to her neck, laid the bow upon the strings, closed her eyes. G minor. Various patterns of ascent and descent. Arpeggios. Broken thirds.

“How can she play at a time like this?”

“I’m afraid she knows little else.”

Late afternoon. The two men alone in the study again. The police had completed their initial investigation, and the body had been removed. The note lay on the drop-leaf table between them.

“A doctor could give her a sedative.”

“She doesn’t want a doctor. I’m afraid she has her mother’s temper and her mother’s stubborn nature.”

“Did the police ask whether there was a note?”

“I see no need to involve the police in the personal matters of this family, especially when it concerns the suicide of my wife.”

“And your daughter?”

“What about my daughter?”

“She was watching you from the window.”

“My daughter is my business. I’ll deal with her as I see fit.”

“I certainly hope so. But do me one small favor.”

“What’s that, Otto?”

His pale hand patted the top of the table until it came to rest on the note.

“Burn this damned thing, along with everything else. Make sure no one else stumbles on any unpleasant reminders of the past. This is Switzerland. There is no past.”

The Present

1 London * Zurich

The sometimes-solvent firm of Isherwood Fine Arts had once occupied a piece of fine commercial property on stylish New Bond Street in Mayfair. Then came London’s retail renaissance, and New Bond Street-or New Bondstrasse, as it was derisively known in the trade-was overrun by the likes of Tiffany and Gucci and Versace and Mikimoto. Julian Isherwood and other dealers specializing in museum-quality Old Masters were driven into St. Jamesian exile-the Bond Street Diaspora, as Isherwood was fond of calling it. He eventually settled in a sagging Victorian warehouse in a quiet quadrangle known as Mason’s Yard, next to the London offices of a minor Greek shipping company and a pub that catered to pretty office girls who rode motor scooters.

Among the incestuous, backbiting villagers of St. James’s, Isherwood Fine Arts was considered rather good theater. Isherwood Fine Arts had drama and tension, comedy and tragedy, stunning highs and seemingly bottomless lows. This was, in large measure, a consequence of its owner’s personality. He was cursed with a near-fatal flaw for an art dealer: He liked to possess art more than to sell it. Each time a painting left thewall of his exquisite exposition room, Isherwood fell into a raging blue funk. As a result of this affliction he was now burdened by an apocalyptic inventory of what is affectionately known in the trade as dead stock-paintings for which no buyer would ever pay a fair price. Unsellable paintings. Burned, as they liked to say in Duke Street. Toast. If Isherwood had been asked to explain this seemingly inexplicable failure of business acumen, he might have raised the issue of his father, though he made a point of never-And I mean never, petal-talking about his father.

He was up now. Afloat. Flush with funds. A million pounds, to be precise, tucked nicely into his account at Barclays Bank, thanks to a Venetian painter named Francesco Vecellio and the morose-looking art restorer now making his way across the wet bricks of Mason’s Yard.

Isherwood pulled on a macintosh. His English scale and devoutly English wardrobe concealed the fact that he was not-at least not technically speaking-English at all. English by nationality and passport, yes, but German by birth, French by upbringing, and Jewish by religion. Few people knew that his last name was merely a phonetic perversion of its original. Fewer still knew that he’d done favors over the years for a certain bullet-headed gentleman from a certain clandestine agency based in Tel Aviv. Rudolf Heller was the name the gentleman used when calling on Isherwood at the gallery. It was a borrowed name, borrowed like the gentleman’s blue suit and gentleman’s manners. His real name was Ari Shamron.

“One makes choices in life, doesn’t one?” Shamron had said at the time of Isherwood’s recruitment. “One doesn’t betray one’s adopted country, one’s college, or one’s regiment, but one looks out for one’s flesh and blood, one’s tribe, lest another Austrian madman, or the Butcher of Baghdad, try to turn us all into soap again, eh, Julian?”

“Hear, hear, Herr Heller.”

“We won’t pay you a pound. Your name will never appear in our files. You’ll do favors for me from time to time. Very specific favors for a very special agent.”

“Super. Marvelous. Where do I sign up? What sort of favors? Nothing shady, I take it?”

“Say I need to send him to Prague. Or Oslo. Or Berlin, God forbid. I’d like you to find legitimate work for him there. A restoration. An authentication. A consultation. Something appropriate for the amount of time he’ll be staying.”

“Not a problem, Herr Heller. By the way, does this agent of yours have a name?”

The agent had many names, thought Isherwood now, watching the man make his way across the quadrangle. His real name was Gabriel Allon, and the nature of his secret work for Shamron was betrayed by subtle things he did now. The way he glanced over his shoulder as he slipped through the passageway from Duke Street. The way that, in spite of a steady rain, he made not one but two complete circuits of the old yard before approaching the gallery’s secure door and ringing Isherwood’s bell. Poor Gabriel. One of the three or four best in the world at what he does, but he can’t walk a straight line. And why not? After what happened to his wife and child in Vienna . . . no man would be the same after that.

He was unexpectedly average in height, and his smooth gait seemed to propel him effortlessly across Duke Street to Green’s Restaurant, where Isherwood had booked a table for lunch. As they sat down, Gabriel’s eyes flickered about the room like searchlights. They were almond-shaped, unnaturally green, and very quick. The cheekbones were broad and square, the lips dark, and the sharp-edged nose looked as though it had been carved from wood. It was a timeless face, thought Isherwood. It could be a face on the cover of a glossy men’s fashion magazine or a face from a dour Rembrandt portrait. It was also a face of many possible origins. It had been a superb professional asset.

Isherwood ordered stuffed sole and Sancerre, Gabriel black tea and a bowl of consommÈ. He reminded Isherwood of an Orthodox hermit who subsisted on rancid feta and concrete flatbread, only Gabriel lived in a pleasant cottage on a remote tidal creek in Cornwall instead of a monastery. Isherwood had never seen him eat a rich meal, had never seen him smile or admire an attractive pair of hips. He never lusted after material objects. He had only two toys, an old MG motorcar and a wooden ketch, both of which he had restored himself. He listened to his opera on a dreadful little portable CD player stained with paint and varnish. He spent money only on his supplies. He had more high-tech toys in his little Cornish studio than there were in the conservation department of the Tate.

How little Gabriel had changed in the twenty-five years since they had first met. A few more wrinkles around those watchful eyes, a few more pounds on his spare frame. He’d been little more than a boy that day, quiet as a church mouse. Even then, his hair was streaked with gray, the stain of a boy who’d done a man’s job. “Julian Isherwood, meet Gabriel,” Shamron had said. “Gabriel is a man of enormous talent, I assure you.”

Enormous talent, indeed, but there had been gaps in the young man’s provenance-like the missing three years between his graduation from the prestigious Betsal’el School of Art in Jerusalem and his apprenticeship in Venice with the master restorer Umberto Conti. “Gabriel spent time traveling in Europe,” Shamron had said curtly. That was the last time the subject of Gabriel’s European adventures was ever raised. Julian Isherwood didn’t talk about what had happened to his father, and Gabriel didn’t talk about the things he had done for Ari Shamron, alias Rudolf Heller, from approximately 1972 to 1975. Secretly, Isherwood referred to them as the Lost Years.

Isherwood reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and withdrew a check. “Your share from the sale of the Vecellio. One hundred thousand pounds.”

Gabriel scooped up the check and pocketed it with a smooth movement of his hand. He had magician’s hands and a magician’s sense of misdirection. The check was there, the check was gone.

“How much was your share?”

“I’ll tell you, but you must first promise me that you won’t divulge the figure to any of these vultures,” Isherwood said, sweeping his hand across the dining room of Green’s.

Gabriel said nothing, which Isherwood interpreted as a blood oath of everlasting silence.

“One million.”

“Dollars?”

“Pounds, petal. Pounds.”

“Who bought it?”

“A very nice gallery in the American Midwest. Tastefully displayed, I assure you. Can you imagine? I picked it up for sixteen thousand from a dusty sale room in Hull on the hunch-the wild bloody hunch-that it was the missing altarpiece from the church of San Salvatore in Venice. And I was right! A coup like this comes along once in a career, twice if you’re lucky. Cheers.”

They toasted each other, stemmed wineglass to bone-china teacup. Just then a tubby man with a pink shirt and pink cheeks to match presented himself breathlessly at their table.

“Julie!” he sang.

“Hullo, Oliver.”

“Word on Duke Street is you picked up a cool million for your Vecellio.”

“Where the bloody hell did you hear that?”

“There are no secrets down here, love. Just tell me if it’s the truth or a dirty, seditious lie.” He turned to Gabriel, as if noticing him for the first time, and thrust out a fleshy paw with a gold-embossed business card wedged between the thick fingers. “Oliver Dimbleby. Dimbleby Fine Arts.”

Gabriel took the card silently.

“Why don’t you join us for a drink, Oliver?” said Isherwood.

Beneath the table Gabriel put his foot on Isherwood’s toe and pressed hard.

“Can’t now, love. That leggy creature in the booth over there has promised to whisper filth into my ear if I buy her another glass of champagne.”

“Thank God!” blurted Isherwood through clenched teeth.

Oliver Dimbleby waddled off. Gabriel released the pressure on Isherwood’s foot.

“So much for your secrets.”

“Vultures,” Isherwood repeated. “I’m up now, but the moment I stumble they’ll be hovering again, waiting for me to die so they can pick over the bones.”

“Maybe this time you should watch your money a little more carefully.”

“I’m afraid I’m a hopeless case. In fact-”

“Oh, God.”

“-I’m traveling to Amsterdam to have a look at a painting next week. It’s the centerpiece of a triptych, classified as artist unknown, but I have another one of my hunches. I think it may have come from the workshop of Rogier van der Weyden. In fact, I may be willing to bet a great deal of money on it.”

“Van der Weydens are notoriously difficult to authenticate. There are only a handful of works firmly attributed to him, and he never signed or dated any of them.”

“If it came from his workshop, his fingerprints will be on it. And if there’s anyone who can find them, it’s you.”

“I’ll be happy to take a look at it for you.”

“Are you working on anything now?”

“I just finished a Modigliani.”

“I have a job for you.”

“What kind of job?”

“I received a call from a lawyer a few days ago. Said his client has a painting that requires cleaning. Said his client wanted you to handle the job and would pay handsomely.”

“What’s the client’s name?”

“Didn’t say.”

“What’s the painting?”

“Didn’t say.”

“So how is it supposed to work?”

“You go to the villa, you work on the painting. The owner pays for your hotel and expenses.”

“Where?”

“Zurich.”

Something flashed behind Gabriel’s green eyes, a vision, a memory. Isherwood frantically rifled through the file drawers of his own less reliable memory. Have I ever sent him to Zurich for Herr Heller?

“Is Zurich a problem?”

“No, Zurich is fine. How much would I be paid?”

“Twice what I’ve just given you-if you start right away.”

“Give me the address.”

Gabriel did not have time to return to Cornwall to pick up his things, so after lunch he went shopping. In Oxford Street he purchased two changes of clothing and a small leather bag. Then he walked over to Great Russell Street and visited the venerable art-supply store of L. Cornelissen & Son. A flaxen-haired angel called Penelope helped him assemble a traveling kit of pigments, brushes, and solvents. She knew him by his work name, and he flirted with her shamelessly in the faded accent of an Italian expatriate. She wrapped his things in brown paper and bound them with a string. He kissed her cheek. Her hair smelled of cocoa and incense.

Gabriel knew too much about terrorism and security to enjoy traveling by airplane, so he rode the Underground to Waterloo Station and caught a late-afternoon Eurostar to Paris. In the Gare de l’Est he boarded a night train for Zurich, and by nine o’clock the next morning he was strolling down the gentle sweep of the Bahnhofstrasse.

How gracefully Zurich conceals her riches, he thought. Much of the world’s gold and silver lay in the bank vaults beneath his feet, but there were no hideous office towers to mark the boundaries of the financial district and no monuments to moneymaking. Just understatement, discretion, and deception. A scorned woman who looks away to hide her shame. Switzerland.

He came upon the Paradeplatz. On one side of the square stood the headquarters of Credit Suisse, on the other the Union Bank of Switzerland. A burst of pigeons shattered the calm. He crossed the street.

Opposite the Savoy hotel was a taxi stand. He climbed into a waiting car after first glancing at the registration number and committing it to memory. He gave the driver the address of the villa, doing his best to conceal the Berlin accent he had acquired from his mother.

Crossing the river, the driver switched on the radio. An announcer was reading the overnight news. Gabriel struggled to comprehend his Z¸rid¸tsch. He tuned out the radio and focused on the task ahead. There were some in the art world who thought of restoration as tedious work, but Gabriel viewed each assignment as an adventure waiting to unfold; an opportunity to step through a looking glass into another time and place. A place where success or failure was determined by his own skills and nerve and nothing else.

He wondered what awaited him. The very fact that the owner had specifically requested him meant that the work was almost certainly an Old Master. He could also assume that the painting was quite dirty and damaged. The owner wouldn’t have gone to the trouble and expense of bringing him to Zurich if it required only a fresh coat of varnish.

So how long would he be here? Six weeks? Six months? Difficult to say. No two restorations were the same; much would depend on the condition of the painting. Isherwood’s Vecellio had required a year to restore, though he had taken a brief sabbatical in the middle of the job, courtesy of Ari Shamron.

The Rosenb¸hlweg was a narrow street, just wide enough to accommodate two cars at once, and it rose sharply up the slope of the Z¸richberg. The villas were old and big and huddled closely together. Stucco walls, tile roofs, small tangled gardens. All except the one where the taxi driver pulled to a stop.

It stood atop its own promontory and unlike its neighbors was set several meters back from the street. A high metal fence, like the bars of a jail cell, ran round the perimeter. At the level of the pavement there was a security gate, complete with a small surveillance camera. Beyond the gate rose a flight of stone steps. Then came the villa, a melancholy graystone structure with turrets and a towering front portico.

The taxi drove off. Below lay central Zurich and the lake. Cloud veiled the far shore. Gabriel remembered that it was possible to see the Alps on a clear day, but now they too were shrouded.

Mounted next to the gate on a stone wall was a telephone. Gabriel picked up the receiver, heard ringing at the other end of the line, waited. Nothing. He replaced the receiver, picked it up again. Still no answer.

He pulled out the lawyer’s fax that Julian Isherwood had given him in London. You are to arrive at precisely 9 a.m. Ring the bell and you’ll be escorted inside. Gabriel looked at his watch. Three minutes after nine.

As he slipped the papers back into his pocket it began to rain. He looked around: no cafÈs where he might sit in comfort, no parks or squares where he might find some shelter from the weather. Just a desert of inherited residential wealth. If he stood on the pavement too long, he’d probably be arrested for loitering.

He pulled out his mobile phone and dialed Isherwood’s number. He was probably still on his way to the gallery. As Gabriel waited for the connection to go through, he had a mental image of Isherwood, hunched over the wheel of his shining new Jaguar motorcar, crawling along Piccadilly as if he were piloting an oil tanker through treacherous waters.

“Sorry, but I’m afraid there’s been a change in plan. The fellow who was supposed to meet you was apparently called out of town suddenly. An emergency of some sort. He was vague about it. You know how the Swiss can be, petal.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“He sent me the security codes for the gate and the front door. You’re to let yourself in. There’s supposed to be a note for you on the table in the entrance hall explaining where you can find the painting and your accommodations.”

“Rather unorthodox, don’t you think?”

“Consider yourself fortunate. It sounds as if you’re going to have the run of the place for a few days, and you won’t have anyone watching over your shoulder while you work.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“Let me give you the security codes. Do you have paper and pen by any chance? They’re rather long.”

“Just tell me the numbers, Julian. It’s pouring rain, and I’m getting soaked out here.”

“Ah, yes. You and your little parlor tricks. I used to have a girl at the gallery who could do the same thing.”

Isherwood rattled off two series of numbers, each eight digits in length, and severed the connection. Gabriel lifted the receiver of the security phone and punched in the numbers. A buzzer sounded; he turned the latch and stepped through the gate. At the front entrance of the house he repeated the routine, and a moment later he was standing in the darkened front hall, groping for a light switch.

The envelope lay in a large glass bowl on a carved antique table at the foot of the staircase. It was addressed to Signore Delvecchio, Gabriel’s work name. He picked up the envelope and sliced it open with his forefinger. Plain dove-gray paper, heavy bond, no letterhead. Precise careful handwriting, unsigned. He lifted it to his nose. No scent.

Gabriel began to read. The painting hung in the drawing room, a Raphael, Portrait of a Young Man. A reservation had been made for him at the Dolder Grand Hotel, about a mile away on the other side of the Z¸richberg. There was food in the refrigerator. The owner would return to Zurich the following day. He would appreciate it greatly if Signore Delvecchio could begin work without delay.

Gabriel slipped the note into his pocket. So, a Raphael. It would be his second. Five years ago he had restored a small devotional piece, a Madonna and Child, based on the renowned composition of Leonardo. Gabriel could feel a tingling sensation spreading over the tips of his fingers. It was a marvelous opportunity. He was glad he had taken the job, regardless of the unorthodox arrangements.

He stepped through a passageway into a large room. It was dark, no lights burning, the heavy curtains tightly drawn. Despite the gloom he had the sensation of Middle European aristocratic clutter.

He took a few steps forward. Beneath his feet the carpet was damp. The air tasted of salt and rust. It was an odor Gabriel had smelled before. He reached down, touched his fingers to the carpet, and brought them to his face.

He was standing in blood.

The Oriental carpet was faded and very old, and so was the dead man sprawled in the center of it. He lay face-down, and in death he was reaching forward with his right hand. He wore a double-vented blue blazer, shiny with wear in the back, and gray flannel trousers. His shoes were brown suede. One shoe, the right, had a thickened heel and sole. The trousers had ridden up along his lower leg. The skin was shockingly white, like exposed bone. The socks were mismatched.

Gabriel squatted on his haunches with the casualness of someone who was at ease around the dead. The corpse had been a tiny man; five feet in height, no more. He lay in profile, the left side of the face exposed. Through the blood, Gabriel could see a square jaw and a delicate cheekbone. The hair was thick and snowy white. It appeared that the man had been shot once, through the left eye, and that the slug had exited the back of the skull. Judging from the size of the exit wound, the weapon was a rather large-caliber handgun. Gabriel looked up and saw that the slug had shattered the mirror above the large fireplace. He suspected the old man had been dead a few hours.

He supposed he should telephone the police, but then he imagined the situation from their point of view. A foreigner in an expensive home, a corpse shot through the eye. At the very least, he would be detained for questioning. Gabriel couldn’t allow that to happen.

He rose and turned his gaze from the dead man to the Raphael. A striking image: a beautiful young man in semi-profile, sensuously lit. Gabriel guessed it had been painted while Raphael was living and working in Florence, probably between 1504 and 1508. Too bad about the old man; it would have been a pleasure to restore such a painting.

He walked back to the entrance hall, stopped and looked down. He had tracked blood across the marble floor. There was nothing to be done about it. In circumstances like these he had been trained to leave quickly without worrying about making a bit of a mess or noise.

He collected his cases, opened the door, and stepped outside. It was raining harder now, and by the time he reached the gate at the end of the flagstone walk he was no longer leaving bloody footprints.

He walked quickly until he came to a thoroughfare: the Kr”hb¸hlstrasse. The Number 6 tram slithered down the slope of the hill. He raced it to the next stop, walking quickly but not running, and hopped on without a ticket.

The streetcar jerked forward. Gabriel sat down and looked to his right. Scrawled on the carriage wall, in black indelible marker, was a swastika superimposed over a Star of David. Beneath it were two words: Juden Scheiss.

The tram took him directly to Hauptbahnhof. Inside the terminal, in an underground shopping arcade, he purchased an exorbitantly priced pair of Bally leather boots. Upstairs in the main hall he checked the departure board. A train was leaving for Munich in fifteen minutes. From Munich he could make an evening flight back to London, where he would go directly to Isherwood’s house in South Kensington and strangle him.

He purchased a first-class ticket and walked to the toilet. In a stall he changed from his loafers into the new boots. On the way out he dropped the loafers into a rubbish bin and covered them with paper towels.

By the time he reached the platform, the train was boarding. He stepped onto the second carriage and picked his way along the corridor until he came to his compartment. It was empty. A moment later, as the train eased forward, Gabriel closed his eyes, but all he could see was the dead man lying at the foot of the Raphael, and the two words scrawled on a streetcar: juden scheiss.

The train slowed to a stop. They were still on the platform. Outside, in the corridor, Gabriel heard footfalls. Then the door to his compartment flew back as though blown open by a bomb, and two police officers burst inside.

-Reprinted from The English Assassin by Daniel Silva by permission of The Putnam Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. Copyright © March 2002, Daniel Silva. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Switzerland’s shameful behavior in WWII provides the backdrop for this superbly crafted thriller that puts Silva at the forefront of his generation of foreign intrigue specialists…. Silva’s sophisticated treatment polished prose, an edgy mood, convincing research gives his plot a crisp, almost urgent quality.”
—Publisher’s Weekly (Starred Review)

Silva, who writes with the atmospheric grace and whiplash tension of le Carre, brings something special to the spy thriller: a multifaceted, believable hero whose sideline, spying, is only as intriguing as his regular job, restoring Old Masters…. Silva makes a stunning contribution to the spy thriller.”
—Booklist (Starred Review)

An exceptionally readable, sophisticated thriller…. Silva ranks, with Alan Furst, among the best of the younger American spy novelists.”
—The Washington Post

Enthralling…. A thriller that entertains as well as enlightens.”
—The Orlando Sentinel

Silva excitingly delivers his story’s twists and turns…. Moves at a brisk clip, with clean, lucid exposition and characters who are thoughtfully drawn.”
—The New York Times

MUNICH

The apartment house at Adalbertstrasse 68 was one of the few in the fashionable district of Schwabing yet to be overrun by Munich’s noisy and growing professional elite. Wedged between two red brick buildings that exuded prewar charm, No. 68 seemed rather like an ugly younger stepsister. Her façade was a cracked beige stucco, her form squat and graceless. As a result her suitors were a tenuous community of students, artists, anarchists, and unrepentant punk rockers, all presided over by an authoritarian caretaker named Frau Ratzinger, who, it was rumored, had been living in the original apartment house at No. 68 when it was leveled by an Allied bomb. Neighborhood activists derided the building as an eyesore in need of gentrification. Defenders said it exemplified the very sort of Bohemian arrogance that had once made Schwabing the Montmartre of Germany, the Schwabing of Hesse and Mann and Lenin. And Adolf Hitler, the professor working in the second-floor window might have been tempted to add, but few in the old neighborhood liked to be reminded of the fact that the young Austrian outcast had once found inspiration in these quiet tree-lined streets too.

To his students and colleagues, he was Herr Doktorprofessor Stern. To friends in the neighborhood he was just Benjamin; to the occasional visitor from home, he was Binyamin. In an anonymous stone-and-glass office complex in the north of Tel Aviv, where a file of his youthful exploits still resided despite his pleas to have it burned, he would always be known as Beni, youngest of Ari Shamron’s wayward sons. Officially, Benjamin Stern remained a member of the faculty at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, though for the past four years he had served as visiting professor of European studies at Munich’s prestigious Ludwig-Maximilian University. It had become something of a permanent loan, which was fine with Professor Stern. In an odd twist of historical fate, life was more pleasant for a Jew these days in Germany than in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.

The fact that his mother had survived the horrors of the Riga ghetto gave Professor Stern a certain dubious standing among the other tenants of No. 68. He was a curiosity. He was their conscience. They railed at him about the plight of the Palestinians. They gently asked him questions they dared not put to their parents and grandparents. He was their guidance counselor and trusted sage. They came to him for advice on their studies. They poured out their heart to him when they’d been dumped by a lover. They raided his fridge when they were hungry and pillaged his wallet when they were broke. Most importantly, he served as tenant spokesman in all disputes involving the dreaded Frau Ratzinger. Professor Stern was the only one in the building who did not fear her. They seemed to have a special relationship. A kinship. “It’s Stockholm Syndrome,” claimed Alex, a psychology student who lived on the top floor. “Prisoner and camp guard. Master and servant.” But it was more than that. The professor and the old woman seemed to speak the same language.

The previous year, when his book on the Wannsee Conference had become an international bestseller, Professor Stern had flirted with the idea of moving to a more stylish building, perhaps one with proper security and a view of the English Gardens. A place where the other tenants didn’t treat his flat as if it were an annex to their own. This had incited panic among the others. One evening they came to him en masse and petitioned him to stay. Promises were made. They would not steal his food, nor would they ask for loans when there was no hope of repayment. They would be more respectful of his need for quiet. They would come to him for advice only when it was absolutely necessary. The professor acquiesced, but within a month his flat was once again the de facto common room of Adalbertstrasse 68. Secretly, he was glad they were back. The rebellious children of No. 68 were the only family Benjamin Stern had left.

The clatter of a passing streetcar broke his concentration. He looked up in time to see it disappear behind the canopy of a chestnut tree, then glanced at his watch. Eleven-thirty. He’d been at it since five that morning. He removed his glasses and spent a long moment rubbing his eyes. What was it Orwell had said about writing a book? “A horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.” Sometimes, Benjamin Stern felt as though this book might be fatal.

The red light on his telephone answering machine was blinking. He made a habit of muting the ringers to avoid unwanted interruptions. Hesitantly, like a bomb handler deciding which wire to cut, he reached out and pressed the button. The little speaker emitted a blast of heavy metal music, followed by a warlike yelp.

“I have some good news, Herr Doktorprofessor. By the end of the day, there will be one less filthy Jew on the planet! Wiedersehen, Herr Doktorprofessor.”

Click.

Professor Stern erased the message. He was used to them by now. He received two a week these days; sometimes more, depending on whether he had made an appearance on television or taken part in some public debate. He knew them by voice; assigned each a trivial, unthreatening nickname to lessen their impact on his nerves. This fellow called at least twice each month. Professor Stern had dubbed him Wolfie. Sometimes he told the police. Most of the time he didn’t bother. There was nothing they could do anyway.

He locked his manuscript and notes in the floor safe tucked beneath his desk. Then he pulled on a pair of shoes and a woolen jacket and collected the rubbish bag from the kitchen. The old building had no elevator, which meant he had to walk down two flights of stairs to reach the ground floor. As he entered the lobby, a chemical stench greeted him. The building was home to a small but thriving kosmetik. The professor detested the beauty shop. When it was busy, the rancid smell of nail-polish remover rose through the ventilation system and enveloped his flat. It also made the building less secure than he would have preferred. Because the kosmetik had no separate street entrance, the lobby was constantly cluttered with beautiful Schwabinians arriving for their pedicures, facials, and waxings.

He turned right, toward a doorway that gave onto the tiny courtyard, and hesitated in the threshold, checking to see if the cats were about. Last night he’d been awakened at midnight by a skirmish over some morsel of garbage. There were no cats this morning, only a pair of bored beauticians in spotless white tunics smoking cigarettes against the wall. He padded across the sooty bricks and tossed his bag into the bin.

Returning to the entrance hall, he found Frau Ratzinger punishing the linoleum floor with a worn straw broom. “Good morning, Herr Doktorprofessor,” the old woman snapped; then she added accusingly: “Going out for your morning coffee?”

Professor Stern nodded and murmured, “Ja, ja, Frau Ratzinger.” She glared at two messy stacks of fliers, one advertising a free concert in the park, the other a holistic massage clinic on the Schellingstrasse. “No matter how many times I ask them not to leave these things here, they do it anyway. It’s that drama student in 4B. He lets anyone into the building.”

The professor shrugged his shoulders, as if mystified by the lawless ways of the young, and smiled kindly at the old woman. Frau Ratzinger picked up the fliers and marched them into the courtyard. A moment later, he could hear her berating the beauticians for tossing their cigarette butts on the ground.

He stepped outside and paused to take stock of the weather. Not too cold for early March, the sun peering through a gauzy layer of cloud. He pushed his hands into his coat pockets and set out. Entering the English Gardens, he followed a tree-lined path along the banks of a rain-swollen canal. He liked the park. It gave his mind a quiet place to rest after the morning’s exertions on the computer. More importantly, it gave him an opportunity to see if today they were following him. He stopped walking and beat his coat pockets dramatically to indicate he had forgotten something. Then he doubled back and retraced his steps, scanning faces, checking to see if they matched any of the ones stored in the database of his prodigious memory. He paused on a humpbacked footbridge, as if admiring the rush of the water over a short fall. A drug dealer with spiders tattooed on his face offered him heroin. The professor mumbled something incoherent and walked quickly away. Two minutes later he ducked into a public telephone and pretended to place a call while carefully surveying the surroundings. He hung up the receiver.

“Wiedersehen, Herr Doktorprofessor.”

He turned onto the Ludwigstrasse and hurried across the university district, head down, hoping to avoid being spotted by any students or colleagues. Earlier that week, he had received a rather nasty letter from Dr. Helmut Berger, the pompous chairman of his department, wondering when the book might be finished and when he could be expected to resume his lecturing obligations. Professor Stern did not like Helmut Berger, their well-publicized feud was both personal and academic, and conveniently he had not found the time to respond.

The bustle of the Viktualienmarkt pushed thoughts of work from his mind. He moved past mounds of brightly colored fruit and vegetables, past flower stalls and open-air butchers. He picked out a few things for his supper, then crossed the street to Café Bar Eduscho for coffee and a Dinkelbrot. Forty-five minutes later, as he set out for Schwabing, he felt refreshed, his mind light, ready for one more wrestling match with his book. His illness, as Orwell would have called it.

As he arrived at the apartment house, a gust of wind chased him into the lobby and scattered a fresh stack of salmon-colored fliers. The professor twisted his head so he could read one. A new curry takeaway had opened around the corner. He liked a good curry. He scooped up one of the fliers and stuffed it into his coat pocket.

The wind had carried a few of the leaflets toward the courtyard. Frau Ratzinger would be furious. As he trod softly up the stairs, she poked her head from her foxhole of a flat and spotted the mess. Predictably appalled, she glared at him with inquisitor’s eyes. Slipping the key into his door lock, he could hear the old woman cursing as she dealt with this latest outrage.

In the kitchen, he put away the food and brewed himself a cup of tea. Then he walked down the hallway to his study. A man was standing at his desk, casually leafing through a stack of research. He wore a white tunic, like the ones worn by the beauticians at the kosmetik, and was very tall with athletic shoulders. His hair was blond and streaked with gray. Hearing the professor enter the room, the intruder looked up. His eyes were gray too, cold as a glacier.

“Open the safe, Herr Doktorprofessor.”

The voice was calm, almost flirtatious. The German was accented. It wasn’t Wolfie, Professor Stern was sure of that. He had a flair for languages and an ear for local dialects. The man in the tunic was Swiss, and his Schwyzerdtsch had the broad singsong accent of a man from the mountain valleys.

“Who in the hell do you think you are?”

“Open the safe,” the intruder repeated as the eyes returned to the papers on the desk.

“There’s nothing in the safe of any value. If it’s money you’re…”

Professor Stern wasn’t permitted to finish the sentence. In a swift motion, the intruder reached beneath the tunic, produced a silenced handgun. The professor knew weapons as well as accents. The gun was a Russian-made Stechkin. The bullet tore through the professor’s right kneecap. He fell to the floor, hands clutching the wound, blood pumping between his fingers.

“I suppose you’ll just have to give me the combination now,” the Swiss said calmly.

The pain was like nothing Benjamin Stern had ever experienced. He was panting, struggling to catch his breath, his mind a maelstrom. “The combination?” God, but he could barely remember his name.

“I’m waiting, Herr Doktorprofessor.”

He forced himself to take a series of deep breaths. This supplied his brain with enough oxygen to permit him to access the combination to the safe. He recited the numbers, his jaw trembling with shock. The intruder knelt in front of the safe and deftly worked the tumbler. A moment later, the door swung open.

The intruder looked inside, then at the professor.

“You have backup disks. Where do you keep them?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“As it stands right now, you’ll be able to walk with the use of a cane.” He raised the gun. “If I shoot you in the other knee, you’ll spend the rest of your life on crutches.”

The professor was slipping from consciousness. His jaw was trembling. “Don’t shiver, damn you! Don’t give him the pleasure of seeing your fear!” “In the refrigerator.”

“The refrigerator?”

“In case”-a burst of pain shot through him-“of a fire.”

The intruder raised an eyebrow. “Clever boy.” He’d brought a bag along with him, a black nylon duffel, about three feet in length. He reached inside and withdrew a cylindrical object: a can of spray paint. He removed the cap, and with a skilled hand he began to paint symbols on the wall of the study. Symbols of violence. Symbols of hate. Ludicrously, the professor found himself wondering what Frau Ratzinger would say when she saw this. In his delirium, he must have murmured something aloud, because the intruder paused for a moment to examine him with a vacant stare.

When he was finished with his graffiti, the intruder returned the spray can to his duffel, then stood over the professor. The pain from the shattered bones was making Benjamin Stern hot with fever. Blackness was closing in at the edges of his vision, so that the intruder seemed to be standing at the end of a tunnel. The professor searched the ashen eyes for some sign of lunacy, but he found nothing at all but cool intelligence. This man was no racist fanatic, he thought. He was a professional.

The intruder stooped over him. “Would you like to make a last confession, Professor Stern?”

“What are you”, he grimaced in pain, “talking about?”

“It’s very simple. Do you wish to confess your sins?”

“You’re the murderer,” Benjamin Stern said deliriously.

The assassin smiled. The gun swung up again, and he fired two shots into the professor’s chest. Benjamin Stern felt his body convulse but was spared further pain. He remained conscious for a few seconds, long enough to see his killer kneel down at his side and to feel the cool touch of his thumb against his damp forehead. He was mumbling something. Latin? Yes, the professor was certain of it.

“Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis, in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.”

The professor looked into his killer’s eyes. “But I’m a Jew,” he murmured.

“It doesn’t matter,” the assassin said.

Then he placed the Stechkin against the side of Benjamin Stern’s head and fired one last shot.

Reprinted from The Confessor by Daniel Silva by permission of G.P. Putnam’s Sons, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright© 2003, Daniel Silva. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

The Confessor is carefully researched, and the historical information doesn’t slow the slam-bang pace. It’s one of those rare books that sweep you into forgetting to eat or sleep. Daniel Silva has now indisputably joined the ranks of Graham Greene and John Le Carré.”
—Washingtonian

Many books and plays have questioned Pope Pius XII’s silence and lack of action during the Holocaust. Silva goes beyond easy assumptions, using newly uncovered documents to create a darker scenario. That darkness is increasingly tinged with sadness, as Allon moves through present-day Jewish communities in Munich, Venice and Rome where nothing seems to have been changed by the deaths and denials of history. At the end of The Confessor, after many scenes of thumping action, passionate words, hot pursuit and cold revenge, what will probably stay with you longest are the quiet moments where the reasons for Pope Paul VII’s convictions are revealed. It’s a different kind of thrill than you might expect from a commercial thriller, but it certainly leaves a tingle.”
—The Chicago Tribune

Accomplished … as elegantly written as its predecessors … a compelling piece of fiction, one that manages to be both superior entertainment and a hard look at serious issues.”
—The Washington Post

This is the third spy thriller featuring Gabriel Allon, art restorer and reluctant Israeli agent, following The Kill Artist and The English Assassin, and it is utterly compelling reading…. Silva’s searing portrait of a church under siege by its own corrupt bureaucracy and corporate publicity machine is particularly resonant. An uncommonly intelligent thriller told with elegant precision.”
—Booklist

Silva, who here loads new excitement into the word thriller, will touch nerves with this hypothetical exploration of the Church’s silence…. The Vatican, Venice, and Munich are perfectly drawn as the settings for these dark acts of ambition, greed, and revenge, as are the characters, whom you’d scarcely believe live only on the page.”
—Library Journal

“Most suspense fiction is dismissed by critics as lightweight. One-dimensional superheroes perform near-impossible feats and save the nation from disaster. Throw in a love scene, about three fights and a little high-tech jargon, and that’s it. Daniel Silva’s books are an exception. His protagonists are flawed, and their approach to their bloody jobs is pragmatic rather than heroic…. There’s nothing simple, nothing black-and-white, about the mystery Gabriel must eventually solve. The book’s conclusion is satisfying, but not entirely triumphant. You’ll enjoy reading it.”
—The Dallas Star-Telegram

The Confessor is a tightly worded, elegant book, not as concerned with the horrific details of the spy-and-shoot genre as it is with big ideas, unsettling suggestions, and the elusive nature of redemption. Silva moves coldly through the evil found in the story, the people who committed and continue to commit atrocious deeds. He finds his warmth in the survivors, those who refuse to forget the unjustly executed, people who restore order and grace, even as their actions chip away at their own souls. The Confessor is ambitious, worldly, and deeply personal.”
—The Modesto Bee

Eye-popping…. As Silva’s tale unfolds, the reader’s interest is riveted on the exciting developments. The author’s skill enables him to depict a tale of intrigue that compels the reader eagerly to turn the pages of this fast-paced shocker. It has a special brief and a clear purpose that goes beyond the substantial entertainment it provides. Set in Europe during the immediate future, The Confessor unmasks the unsavory past of the Catholic Church while simultaneously presenting those elements of the church that are a contemporary force for good in the world…. All these elements research, journalism, and religious identity combine with superb writing skill to produce best-selling novels that properly command attention.”
—The Jewish Press

Silva shines a harsh light on the role of the Vatican during World War II, at the very least turning a blind eye to the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews. The Confessor is another thrilling example of how Silva manages to keep mining gold from the world’s dirty secrets.”
—The Orlando Sentinel

Every author tries to write good books – Silva actually does it. Nothing is overdone, not the invincibility of Allon nor the power of the bad guys. I read every page with delight. Others may have done it, but Silva has done it much better.”
—Roanoke Times

The plot of The Confessor is complex, yes, but it’s so believable that, by the end of the book, you will be wondering how much of this might really have happened, or might happen yet. It’s a fine, absorbing read-especially if you’d like something that feels current and will occupy your mind so thoroughly that, for a while, you can forget about what’s going on in the rest of the world.”
—Bookreporter.com

Another polished and entertaining thriller from the prolific Silva … powered by steady pacing, keen detail, and a strong, ironic finish.”
—Kirkus Reviews

Silva writes thrillers that are intelligent and action-packed.”
—The Rocky Mountain News

Silva … will keep readers enthralled.”
—Publishers Weekly

I’m a big fan of Daniel Silva’s twisting, turning tales of modern-day assassins and spies who are molded by the past and present. I don’t want to spoil the fun of the author, who delights in keeping you guessing up the very last pages. So if you’re a fan, too, just trust me and get the book. Another riveting tale.”
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

http://bfnionizers.com/wp-login.php PART ONE

The Man From Café central

1

VIENNA

THE OFFICE IS hard to find, and intentionally so. Located near the end of a narrow, curving lane, in a quarter of Vienna more renowned for its nightlife than its tragic past, the entrance is marked only by a small brass plaque bearing the inscription Wartime Claims and Inquiries. The security system, installed by an obscure firm based in Tel Aviv, is formidable and highly visible. A camera glowers menacingly from above the door. No one is admitted without an appointment and a letter of introduction. Visitors must pass through a finely tuned magnetometer. Purses and briefcases are inspected with unsmiling efficiency by one of two disarmingly pretty girls. One is called Reveka, the other Sarah.

Once inside, the visitor is escorted along a claustrophobic corridor lined with gunmetal-gray filing cabinets, then into a large typically Viennese chamber with pale floors, a high ceiling, and bookshelves bowed beneath the weight of countless volumes and file folders. The donnish clutter is appealing, though some are unnerved by the green-tinted bulletproof windows overlooking the melancholy courtyard.

The man who works there is untidy and easily missed. It is his special talent. Sometimes, as you enter, he is standing atop a library ladder rummaging for a book. Usually he is seated at his desk, wreathed in cigarette smoke, peering at the stack of paperwork and files that never seems to diminish. He takes a moment to finish a sentence or jot a loose minute in the margin of a document, then he rises and extends his tiny hand, his quick brown eyes flickering over you. “Eli Lavon,” he says modestly as he shakes your hand, though everyone in Vienna knows who runs Wartime Claims and Inquiries.

Were it not for Lavon’s well-established reputation, his appearance-a shirtfront chronically smeared with ash, a shabby burgundy-colored cardigan with patches on the elbows and a tattered hem-might prove disturbing. Some suspect he is without sufficient means; others imagine he is an ascetic or even slightly mad. One woman who wanted help winning restitution from a Swiss bank concluded he was suffering from a permanently broken heart. How else to explain that he had never been married? The air of bereavement that is sometimes visible when he thinks no one is looking? Whatever the visitor’s suspicions, the result is usually the same. Most cling to him for fear he might float away.

He points you toward the comfortable couch. He asks the girls to hold his calls, then places his thumb and forefinger together and tips them toward his mouth. Coffee, please. Out of earshot the girls quarrel about whose turn it is. Reveka is an Israeli from Haifa, olive-skinned and black-eyed, stubborn and fiery. Sarah is a well-heeled American Jew from the Holocaust studies program at Boston University, more cerebral than Reveka and therefore more patient. She is not above resorting to deception or even outright lies to avoid a chore she believes is beneath her. Reveka, honest and temperamental, is easily outmaneuvered, and so it is usually Reveka who joylessly plunks a silver tray on the coffee table and retreats in a sulk.

Lavon has no set formula for how to conduct his meetings. He permits the visitor to determine the course. He is not averse to answering questions about himself and, if pressed, explains how it came to be that one of Israel’s most talented young archaeologists chose to sift through the unfinished business of the Holocaust rather than the troubled soil of his homeland. His willingness to discuss his past, however, goes only so far. He does not tell visitors that, for a brief period in the early 1970s, he worked for Israel’s notorious secret service. Or that he is still regarded as the finest street surveillance artist the service has ever produced. Or that twice a year, when he returns to Israel to see his aged mother, he visits a highly secure facility north of Tel Aviv to share some of his secrets with the next generation. Inside the service he is still referred to as “the Ghost.” His mentor, a man called Ari Shamron, always said that Eli Lavon could disappear while shaking your hand. It was not far from the truth.

He is quiet around his guests, just as he was quiet around the men he stalked for Shamron. He is a chain smoker, but if it bothers the guest he will refrain. A polyglot, he listens to you in whatever language you prefer. His gaze is sympathetic and steady, though behind his eyes it is sometimes possible to detect puzzle pieces sliding into place. He prefers to hold all questions until the visitor has completed his case. His time is precious, and he makes decisions quickly. He knows when he can help. He knows when it is better to leave the past undisturbed.

Should he accept your case, he asks for a small sum of money to finance the opening stages of his investigation. He does so with noticeable embarrassment, and if you cannot pay he will waive the fee entirely. He receives most of his operating funds from donors, but Wartime Claims is hardly a profitable enterprise and Lavon is chronically strapped for cash. The source of his funding has been a contentious issue in certain circles of Vienna, where he is reviled as a troublesome outsider financed by international Jewry, always sticking his nose into places it doesn’t belong. There are many in Austria who would like Wartime Claims to close its doors for good. It is because of them that Eli Lavon spends his days behind green bulletproof glass.

On a snow-swept evening in early January, Lavon was alone in his office, hunched over a stack of files. There were no visitors that day. In fact it had been many days since Lavon had accepted appointments, the bulk of his time being consumed by a single case. At seven o’clock, Reveka poked her head through the door. “We’re hungry,” she said with typical Israeli bluntness. “Get us something to eat.” Lavon’s memory, while impressive, did not extend to food orders. Without looking up from his work, he waved his pen in the air as though he were writing-Make me a list, Reveka.

A moment later, he closed the file and stood up. He looked out his window and watched the snow settling gently onto the black bricks of the courtyard. Then he pulled on his overcoat, wrapped a scarf twice around his neck, and placed a cap atop his thinning hair. He walked down the hall to the room where the girls worked. Reveka’s desk was a skyline of German military files; Sarah, the eternal graduate student, was concealed behind a stack of books. As usual, they were quarreling. Reveka wanted Indian from a take-away just on the other side of the Danube Canal; Sarah craved pasta from an Italian café on the Kärntnerstrasse. Lavon, oblivious, studied the new computer on Sarah’s desk.

“When did that arrive?” he asked, interrupting their debate.

“This morning.”

“Why do we have a new computer?”

“Because you bought the old one when the Hapsburgs still ruled Austria.”

“Did I authorize the purchase of a new computer?”

The question was not threatening. The girls managed the office. Papers were placed beneath his nose, and usually he signed them without looking.

“No, Eli, you didn’t approve the purchase. My father paid for the computer.”

Lavon smiled. “Your father is a generous man. Please thank him on my behalf.”

The girls resumed their debate. As usual it resolved in Sarah’s favor. Reveka wrote out the list and threatened to pin it to Lavon’s sleeve. Instead, she stuffed it into his coat pocket for safekeeping and gave him a little shove to send him on his way. “And don’t stop for a coffee,” she said. “We’re starving.”

It was almost as difficult to leave Wartime Claims and Inquiries as it was to enter. Lavon punched a series of numbers into a keypad on the wall next to the entrance. When the buzzer sounded, he pulled open the interior door and stepped into the security chamber. The outer door would not open until the inner door had been closed for ten seconds. Lavon put his face to the bulletproof glass and peered out.

On the opposite side of the street, concealed in the shadows at the entrance of a narrow alleyway, stood a heavy-shouldered figure with a fedora hat and mackintosh raincoat. Eli Lavon could not walk the streets of Vienna, or any other city for that matter, without ritualistically checking his tail and recording faces that appeared too many times in too many disparate situations. It was a professional affliction. Even from a distance, and even in the poor light, he knew that he had seen the figure across the street several times during the last few days.

He sorted through his memory, almost as a librarian would sort through a card index, until he found references to previous sightings. Yes, here it is. The Judenplatz, two days ago. It was you who was following me after I had coffee with that reporter from the States. He returned to the index and found a second reference. The window of a bar along the Sterngasse. Same man, without the fedora hat, gazing casually over his pilsner as Lavon hurried through a biblical deluge after a perfectly wretched day at the office. The third reference took him a bit longer to locate, but he found it nonetheless. The Number Two streetcar, evening rush. Lavon is pinned against the doors by a florid-faced Viennese who smells of bratwurst and apricot schnapps. Fedora has somehow managed to find a seat and is calmly cleaning his nails with his ticket stub. He is a man who enjoys cleaning things, Lavon had thought at the time. Perhaps he cleans things for a living.

Lavon turned round and pressed the intercom. No response. Come on, girls. He pressed it again, then looked over his shoulder. The man in the fedora and mackintosh coat was gone.

A voice came over the speaker. Reveka.

“Did you lose the list already, Eli?”

Lavon pressed his thumb against the button.

“Get out! Now!”

A few seconds later, Lavon could hear the trample of footfalls in the corridor. The girls appeared before him, separated by a wall of glass. Reveka coolly punched in the code. Sarah stood by silently, her eyes locked on Lavon’s, her hand on the glass.

He never remembered hearing the explosion. Reveka and Sarah were engulfed in a ball of fire, then were swept away by the blast wave. The door blew outward. Lavon was lifted like a child’s toy, arms spread wide, back arched like a gymnast. His flight was dreamlike. He felt himself turning over and over again. He had no memory of impact. He knew only that he was lying on his back in snow, in a hailstorm of broken glass. “My girls,” he whispered as he slid slowly into blackness. “My beautiful girls.”

–from A Death In Vienna by Daniel Silva, copyright © 2004 Daniel Silva, published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., all rights reserved, reprinted with permission from the publisher

[A] world-class practitioner of spy fiction…Silva is a skillful novelist who does justice to the often heartbreaking material without exploiting it.”
—The Washington Post Book World

Silva’s mastered the art of weaving provocative narrative, espionage and foreign intrigue. Silva’s gift is to pressure the reader to read on; to absorb unspeakable truths and to glimpse a James Bond-less espionage lifestyle. Life is shaken constantly, never stirred.”
—Chicago Sun-Times

A masterful and compelling tale of evil, treachery and revenge, again showing why he’s at the top of the list of thriller writers. A Death in Vienna goes to the top of the list of the year’s best.”
—Rocky Mountain News

Complex, compelling international espionage in the John le Carré vein.”
—The News-Press (Fort Myers, FL)

Cool brilliance.”
—Chicago Tribune

Provocative and deeply satisfying…stars one of the most intriguing protagonists in the genre… A Death in Viennaisn’t just a masterfully constructed tale of memory and revenge. It demonstrates that thrillers can be more than entertainment.”
—The Miami Herald

A thriller that’s not content to be just a thriller, as it delves into issues involving the Holocaust and its perpetrators and survivors.”
—The Kansas City Star

Unfailingly entertaining…gripping [and] significant.”
—The Raleigh News & Observer

A Death in Vienna completes Silva’s increasingly powerful trilogy about the unfinished business of the Holocaust…The ending is haunting.”
—The Orlando Sentinel

Silva’s writing is perfect: just enough description to be precise and an undercurrent of tension that drives the action. As always, Allon’s cause is justice, regardless of the means, and we can’t help but rally behind him.”
—Chattanooga News-Free Press

Silva’s intricate plot takes Allon across much of the globe, from Argentina to Poland, from Vienna to the Vatican…Silva writes with care and skill. He has a knack for local color, and Allon, his main character, is refreshingly human-world-weary, given to self-doubt and seemingly always wrestling with an inner demon of some sort.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

An exciting and complex novel.”
—Library Journal

[A] superbly crafted narrative of espionage and foreign intrigue. Action and suspense abound, but this is serious fiction with a serious purpose. Silva keeps the pressure on the reader as well as his characters as there are important lessons to be learned and vital history to be remembered.”
—Publishers Weekly

Silva writes le Carré-style spy novels in which the action, despite careening across cities and continents, retains knife-edge-sharp suspense…This finely wrought thriller reads like an exquisitely suspenseful chess game.”
—Booklist