Gabriel tore away the flier and slipped it into his pocket. Then, with Lavon at his side, he walked past Keller without a word or glance and headed down the hill toward the river. In the morning, while taking coffee at Café Brasileira, he rang the number printed on the flier. And by midday, after paying six months’ rent and a security deposit in advance, the apartment was his.
24
BAIRRO ALTO, LISBON
GABRIEL MOVED INTO THE APARTMENT at dusk with the air of a man whose wife could no longer tolerate his company. He had no possessions other than a well-traveled overnight bag, and wore no expression other than a scowl that said he would prefer to be left to his own devices. Eli Lavon arrived an hour later bearing two bags of groceries—the makings, or so it seemed, of a meal of consolation. Keller came last. He stole into the building with the silence of a night thief and settled in front of a window as though he were digging into a hide in the Bandit Country of South Armagh. And thus commenced the long watch.
The apartment was furnished, but barely. The small gathering of mismatched chairs in the sitting room looked as if they had been acquired at a neighborhood flea market; the two bedrooms were like the cells of ascetic monks. The shortage of accommodations was of no consequence, for one man kept watch at the window always. Invariably, it was Keller. He had waited a long time for Quinn to rise from his cellar and wanted the honor of being the first to clap eyes upon the prize. Gabriel hung the composite sketch of Quinn on the wall like a family portrait, and Keller consulted it each time a man of appropriate age and height—mid-forties, perhaps five foot ten—passed in the narrow street. At sunrise on the third morning, he was convinced he saw Quinn approaching from the direction of the shuttered café. It was Quinn’s face, he told Lavon in an excited whisper. More important, he said, it was Quinn’s walk. But it wasn’t Quinn; it was a Portuguese man who, they discovered later, worked in a shop a few streets away. Lavon, a scholar of physical surveillance, explained that the mistake was one of the dangers of a long vigil. Sometimes the watcher sees what he wants to see. And sometimes the prize is standing right in front of him and the watcher is too blinded by fatigue or ambition to even realize it.
The landlord believed Gabriel to be the apartment’s sole occupant, so only Gabriel showed his face in public. He was a man with a damaged heart, a man with too much time on his hands. He wandered the hilly streets of the Bairro Alto, he rode trams seemingly without destination, he visited the Museu do Chiado, he took his afternoon coffee at Café Brasileira. And in a green park along the banks of the Tagus, he met an Office courier who gave him a case filled with the tools of a field outpost: a tripod-mounted camera with a night-vision telephoto lens, a parabolic microphone, secure radios, a concealable miniature transmitter, and a laptop computer with a secure satellite link to King Saul Boulevard. In addition, there was a note from the chief of Operations gently chiding Gabriel for acquiring a safe property on his own rather than through the auspices of Housekeeping. There was also a handwritten letter from Chiara. Gabriel read it twice before burning it in the bathroom sink. Afterward, his mood was as dark as the ashes he washed ritually down the drain.
“My offer still stands,” said Lavon.
“What’s that?”
“I’ll stay here with Keller. You go home to be with your wife.”
Gabriel’s answer was the same as before, and Lavon never raised the subject again—even late at night, when the tables of the corner restaurant had been packed away and rain baptized the silent street. They dimmed the lights of the apartment so their shadows would not be visible from without, and in the darkness the years faded from their faces. They might have been the same boys of twenty whom the Office had dispatched in the autumn of 1972 to hunt down the perpetrators of the Munich Olympics massacre. The operation had been code-named Wrath of God. In the Hebrew-based lexicon of the team, Lavon had been an ayin, a tracker. Gabriel was an aleph, an assassin. For three years they stalked their prey across Europe, killing in darkness and in broad daylight, living in fear that at any moment they might be arrested and charged as murderers. They had spent endless nights in shabby rooms watching doorways and men, secretly inhabiting the lives of others. Stress and visions of blood robbed them both of the ability to sleep. A transistor radio was their only link to the real world. It told them about wars won and lost, about an American president who resigned in disgrace, and sometimes, on warm summer nights, it played music for them—the same music that normal boys of twenty were listening to, boys who had not been sent forth by their country to serve as executioners, angels of vengeance for eleven murdered Jews.
Sleeplessness was soon epidemic in the little apartment in the Bairro Alto. They had planned to serve rotating two-hour shifts at the outpost by the window, but as the days wore on, and the mutual insomnia took hold, the three veteran operatives stood something like a joint permanent watch. All those who passed beneath their window were photographed, regardless of their age, gender, or national origin. Those who entered the target building received additional scrutiny, as did its residents. Gradually, their secrets came spilling into the observation post. Such was the nature of any long-term watch. More often than not, it was the venal sins of the innocent that were exposed.
The apartment contained a television with a satellite dish that lost hold of its signal each time rain fell from the sky or a modest exhalation of wind blew through the street. It served as their link to a world that with each passing day seemed to be spinning further out of control. It was the world Gabriel would inherit the moment he swore his oath as the next chief of the Office. And it would be Keller’s world, too, should he choose it. Keller was Gabriel’s last restoration. His dirty varnish had been removed, his canvas had been relined and retouched. He was no longer the English assassin. Soon he would be the English spy.
Like all good watchers, Keller was blessed with a natural forbearance. But seven days into the vigil, his patience abandoned him. Lavon suggested a walk along the river or a drive up the coast, anything to break the monotony of the watch, but Keller refused to leave the apartment or surrender his post in the window. He photographed the faces that passed beneath his feet—the old acquaintances, the new arrivals, the passersby—and he waited for a man in his mid-forties, approximately five feet ten inches in height, to alight at the entrance of the apartment house on the opposite side of the thin street. To Lavon, it seemed as if Keller were keeping watch on Lower Market Street in Omagh, waiting for a red Vauxhall Cavalier riding low on its rear axle to pull to the curb, waiting for two men, Quinn and Walsh, to climb out. Walsh had been punished for his sins. Quinn would be next.
But when another day passed with no sign of him, Keller suggested they take the search elsewhere. South America, he said, was the logical place. They could slip into Caracas and start kicking down doors until they found Quinn’s. Gabriel appeared to give the idea serious consideration. In reality, he was watching the woman of perhaps thirty sitting alone at the restaurant at the end of the street. She had placed her handbag on the chair next to her. It was a large handbag, large enough to accommodate toiletries, even a change of clothing. The zipper was open, and the bag was turned in a way that made the contents easily accessible. A female Office field agent would have left her bag in the same place, thought Gabriel, especially if the bag contained a gun.