It was Mafuz, standing pillar-like at his post by the front door, who saw him gratefully into the night. He rode through the streets of the town for several minutes to make certain he was not being followed. Then, with his headlamp doused, he made his way to the narrow dirt-and-gravel track running along the rim of the valley with three villas. One of the villas, the one in the east, was illuminated as if for a special occasion. Keller was standing amid a coppice of pine, staring at the villa intently. Gabriel joined him and stared at it, too. After a few minutes a shadowed figure appeared in the garden and a lighter flared. Keller extended his arm and whispered, “Bang, bang, you’re dead.”
They remained in the pine trees until the man had returned to the villa. Then they sat in Keller’s darkened Renault thrashing out the final details of their plan of attack—their positions, their sightlines, their firing lanes, their conduct inside the villa itself. After twenty minutes all that remained to be decided was who would take the shot that would set everything in motion. Gabriel insisted he be the one, but Keller objected. Then he reminded Gabriel that he had achieved the highest score ever recorded in the killing house at Hereford.
“It was an exercise,” said Gabriel dismissively.
“A live-fire exercise,” Keller countered.
“It was still an exercise.”
“What’s your point?”
“I once shot a Palestinian terrorist between the eyes from the back of a moving motorcycle.”
“So what?”
“The terrorist was sitting in the middle of a crowded café on the boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris.”
“Yes,” said Keller, feigning boredom, “I think I remember reading something about that in one of my history books.”
In the end it came down to a coin toss.
“Don’t miss,” said Gabriel, as he slipped the coin back into his pocket.
“I never miss.”
By then, it was approaching ten o’clock, too early to move. Keller closed his eyes and slept while Gabriel sat staring at the lights of the easternmost villa. He imagined a small room on the lower level: a cot, handcuffs, a hood, a bucket for a toilet, insulation to muffle the screaming, a woman who was no longer herself. And for an instant he was walking through Russian snow, toward a dacha on the edge of a birch forest. He blinked away the image and absently fingered the hand of red coral hanging around his neck. When she is dead, he was thinking. Then you will know the truth.
Four hours later he squeezed Keller’s shoulder. Keller woke instantly, climbed out, and removed the rucksack from the trunk of the car. Inside were two rolls of duct tape, a pair of heavy-duty twenty-four-inch bolt cutters, and two suppressors—one for Keller’s HK45 compact, the other for Gabriel’s Beretta. Gabriel screwed the suppressor into the end of the Beretta’s barrel and swung the rucksack over his shoulder. Then he followed Keller down through the pine trees and over the rim of the valley. There was no moon or stars and not a breath of wind. Keller moved through the scrub and rock formations in complete silence, slowly, as if he were under water. Every few steps he would raise his right hand to freeze Gabriel in his tracks, but otherwise they did not communicate. They did not need to. Every step, every move, had been worked out in advance.
At the base of the hill, they parted. Keller went to the southern side of the villa and settled into a drainage ditch; Gabriel headed for the eastern side and concealed himself in a thicket of briar. His position was fifty feet beyond the line where the exterior lights of the villa died and the darkness reclaimed the night. Directly opposite was a row of French doors leading from the garden to the sitting room. Through the shutters he could see the flickering light of the television and, he assumed, the faint shadow of a man.
He looked at his watch. It was 2:37 a.m. Three hours of darkness left. After that, there could be no more trips to the garden for the man inside the villa. Surely he would step outside for one last breath of fresh air and one more glance at the sky, even if there was no moon or stars and not a breath of wind. Then, from the drainage ditch on the southern side of the villa, there would come a single shot. And then it would begin: a cot, handcuffs, a bucket for a toilet, a woman who was no longer herself.
He glanced at his watch again, saw that only two minutes had passed, and shivered in the cold. Perhaps Keller was right; perhaps he was an indoor spy after all. To help pass the time he removed himself mentally from the thicket of briar and placed himself before a canvas. It was the painting he had left behind in Jerusalem—Susanna bathing in her garden, watched over by the village elders. Once again he cast Madeline in the role of Susanna, though now the wounds he healed were caused not by time but by captivity.
He worked slowly but steadily, repairing the sores on her wrists, adding flesh to her atrophied shoulders and color to her hollow cheeks. And all the while he kept watch on the passing of the minutes, and on the villa, which appeared to him in the background of the painting. For two hours there was no movement. Then, as the first light appeared in the eastern sky, one of the French doors opened slowly and a man stepped into Madeline’s garden. He stretched his arms, looked left, then right, then left again. At Madeline’s request, Gabriel quickly completed the restoration. And when he saw a flash of light from the south, he rose from his knees, gun in hand, and started running.
19