Page 38 of The Other Woman

“I’m sure Alistair Hughes thought the same thing. Do me a favor, Allon. Don’t get yourself killed on my turf.”

Gabriel rose. “I’ll do my best.”

24

Bern

Gabriel spotted the two bodyguards in the cobbled street beneath his window at midday. They were as inconspicuous as a couple of burning cars. He referred to them as Frick and Frack, but only inwardly. They were Helvetian lads, built like oxen, and not to be trifled with.

They followed him through the galleries of the Kunstmuseum, and to the café in the Kramgasse where he took his lunch, and to the Israeli Embassy on the Alpenstrasse, where he learned his service was humming along satisfactorily without his hand on the tiller. His family, too. Secretly, this pleased him. He had never wished to be indispensable.

That night, as he labored over his laptop in his room at the Savoy, Frick and Frack were replaced by a car containing two uniformed officers from the Kantonspolizei Bern. They remained there until morning, when Frick and Frack returned. Gabriel led them on a merry chase for much of that afternoon, and once, if only to see whether he still had it in him, he dropped them like rocks while crossing the Nydeggbrücke, which connected the Old City of Bern to the new.

Free of surveillance, he took afternoon tea at the Schweizerhof, in the same chair where Alistair Hughes had sat during the final minutes of his life. Gabriel imagined Dmitri Sokolov seated across from him. Dmitri who did not play by Geneva rules. Dmitri who specialized inkompromat. Gabriel remembered the way Sokolov had been clutching Alistair Hughes’s wrist—right hand Dmitri, left wrist Alistair. He supposed something could have passed between them, a flash drive or a message in code, but he doubted it. He had watched the video a hundred times at least. The transaction had been one way, Dmitri Sokolov to Alistair Hughes. It was the envelope Sokolov had slid beneath the copy of theFinancial Times. Hughes had burned the contents of the envelope upstairs in his room. Perhaps they were instructions for his exfiltration to Moscow, perhaps they were something else. Four minutes and thirteen seconds later he was dead.

When Gabriel returned to the Savoy, Frick and Frack were licking their wounds in the street. They all three had drinks together that night in the hotel’s bar. Frick’s real name was Kurt. He was from Wassen, a village of four hundred souls in Canton Uri. Frack was called Matthias. He was a Catholic kid from Fribourg and a former member of the Vatican Swiss Guards. Gabriel realized that they had met once before, when Gabriel was restoring Caravaggio’sDeposition of Christin the lab of the Vatican Museum.

“Bittel’s getting close,” he informed Gabriel. “He says he might have something for you.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow afternoon, maybe sooner.”

“Sooner would be better.”

“If you wanted a miracle, you should have gone to your friend the Holy Father.”

Gabriel smiled. “Did Bittel say what it was?”

“A woman,” said Matthias into his glass of beer.

“In Bern?”

“Münchenbuchsee. It’s—”

“A little town just north of here.”

“How do you know Münchenbuchsee?”

“Paul Klee was born there.”

Gabriel did not sleep that night, and in the morning he headed straight to the Israeli Embassy, followed by two uniformed officers from the Kantonspolizei Bern. And there he passed one of the longest days of his life, nibbling at a container of stale Viennese butter cookies left over from the days when Uzi Navot was chief and the stations used to keep snacks on hand in case he dropped in unannounced.

By six that evening, there was still no word. Gabriel considered calling Bittel but decided forbearance was the better course of action. He was rewarded at half past eight, when Bittel finally rang. He did so from a secure line at NDB headquarters.

“It turns out the rumors were true. Hedidhave a woman here.”

“What’s her name?”

“Klara Brünner.”

“What does she do?”

“She’s a psychiatrist,” said Bittel, “at the Privatklinik Schloss in Münchenbuchsee.”

Privatklinik Schloss...

Yes, thought Gabriel, that would explain everything.