“Are you listening to me?” asked Keller.

“Hanging on every word,” lied Gabriel.

The last light of dusk was fading; the woman of perhaps thirty was still wearing sunglasses. Gabriel trained the telephoto lens upon her face, zoomed in, and stole her photograph. He examined it carefully in the viewfinder of the camera. It was a good face, he thought, a face worthy of painting. The cheekbones were wide, the chin was small and delicate, the skin was flawless and white. The sunglasses rendered her eyes invisible, but Gabriel would have guessed they were blue. Her hair was shoulder length and very black. He doubted the color was natural.

At the moment Gabriel had taken her photograph, the woman had been looking at the menu. Now she was gazing up the length of the street. It was not the preferred view. Most patrons of the restaurant faced the opposite direction, which had a better vista of the city. A waiter appeared. Too late, Gabriel seized the parabolic microphone and trained it on the table. He heard the waiter say “Thank you” in English, followed by a burst of dance music. It was the ringer of her mobile. She dismissed the call with the press of a button, returned the phone to the handbag, and withdrew a Lisbon guidebook. Gabriel again placed his eye to the viewfinder and zoomed in, not on the woman’s face but on the guidebook she held in her hand. It was Frommer’s, English-language. She lowered it after a few seconds and resumed her study of the street.

“What are you looking at?” asked Keller.

“I’m not sure.”

Keller moved closer to the window and followed Gabriel’s gaze. “Pretty,” he said.

“Maybe.”

“Newcomer or habitué?”

“Tourist, apparently.”

“Why would a pretty young tourist eat alone?”

“Good question.”

The waiter reappeared bearing a glass of white wine, which he placed on the table next to the Lisbon guidebook. He opened his order pad, but the woman said something that made him withdraw without writing anything down. He returned a moment later with a check. He placed it on the table and departed. No words were exchanged.

“What just happened?” asked Keller.

“It seems the pretty young tourist had a change of heart.”

“I wonder why.”

“Maybe it had something to do with the phone call she didn’t pick up.”

The woman’s hand was now delving into the open handbag. When it reappeared, it was holding a single banknote. She placed it atop the check, weighted it with the wineglass, and rose.

“I guess she didn’t like it,” said Gabriel.

“Maybe she has a headache.”

The woman was now reaching for the bag. She placed the strap over her shoulder and took one final look up the length of the street. Then she turned in the opposite direction, rounded the corner, and was gone.

“Too bad,” said Keller.

“We’ll see,” said Gabriel.

He was watching the waiter collect the money. But in his thoughts he was calculating how long it would be before he saw her again. Two minutes, he reckoned; that’s how long it would take her to make her way back to her destination along a parallel street. He marked the time on his wristwatch, and when ninety seconds had passed he placed his eye to the viewfinder and began counting slowly. When he reached twenty, he saw her emerge from the half-light, the bag over her shoulder, the sunglasses over her eyes. She stopped at the entrance of the target building, inserted a key into the lock, and pushed open the door. As she entered the foyer, another tenant, a man in his mid-twenties, was coming out. He glanced over his shoulder at her; whether it was in admiration or curiosity, Gabriel could not tell. He snapped the tenant’s photograph, then looked toward the darkened windows on the second floor. Ten seconds later light blossomed behind the blinds.

25

BAIRRO ALTO, LISBON

THEY DID NOT SEE HER again until half past eight the following morning when she appeared on the balcony wearing only a bathrobe—Quinn’s bathrobe, thought Gabriel, for it was far too large for her slender frame. She held a cigarette thoughtfully to her lips and surveyed the street in the steel dawn light. Her eyes were uncovered, and as Gabriel suspected they were blue. Blue as weather. Vermeer blue. He snapped several photographs and forwarded them to King Saul Boulevard. Then he watched the woman withdraw from the balcony and disappear behind the French doors.

For twenty additional minutes light burned in her window. Then the light was extinguished, and a moment later she stepped from the entrance of the building. Her bag hung from one shoulder, her right, and her hands were jammed into the pockets of her coat. It was a schoolgirl toggle coat, not the urban-tough leather jacket she had worn the night before. Her step was brisk; her boots clattered loudly against the paving stones. The sound rose as she flowed beneath the window of the observation post and then receded as she passed the shuttered restaurant and disappeared.

The Citroën that Gabriel had collected in Paris was parked around the corner from the observation post, on a street wide enough to accommodate cars. Keller retrieved it while Gabriel followed the woman on foot down another cobbled alleyway lined with shops and cafés. At the end of the street was a broader boulevard that flowed down the hill like a tributary of the Tagus. The woman entered a coffee shop, ordered at the bar, and sat at the counter along the window. Gabriel entered a café on the opposite side of the boulevard and did the same. Keller waited curbside until a police officer nudged him onward.

For fifteen minutes their positions remained unchanged: the woman in her café, Gabriel in his, Keller behind the wheel of the Citroën. The woman stared into her mobile phone while she drank her coffee and appeared to make at least one call. Then, at half past nine, she slipped the phone into her handbag and went into the street again. She walked south toward the river for several paces before stopping abruptly and waving down a taxi headed in the opposite direction. Gabriel quickly left the café and climbed into the passenger seat of the Citroën. Keller swung a U-turn and put his foot to the floor.

Thirty seconds elapsed before they were able to reestablish contact with the taxi. It plunged northward through the morning traffic, slicing in and out of the trucks, the buses, the shiny German-made sedans of the newly rich and the wheezing rattletraps of Lisbon’s less fortunate. Gabriel had operated infrequently in Lisbon, and his knowledge of the city’s geography was rudimentary. Even so, he had an idea of where the taxi was headed. The route it was following pointed toward Lisbon Airport like the needle of a compass.

They entered a modern quarter of the city and flowed in a river of traffic to a large circle at the edge of a green park. From there they tacked to the northeast to another circle, which spat them onto the Avenida da República. Near the end of the avenue they began to see the first signs for the airport. The taxi followed each one and eventually braked to a halt outside the departure level of Terminal 1. The woman stepped out and headed quickly toward the entrance, as though she were running late for her flight. Gabriel instructed Keller to ditch the Citroën in short-term parking with the gun in the trunk and the keys in the magnetic caddy above the left rear wheel. Then he climbed out and followed the woman into the terminal.

She paused briefly inside the doors to take her bearings and scrutinize the large departure board hanging above the gleaming modern hall. Then she headed directly to the British Airways counter and joined the short queue at first class. It was a piece of good fortune; British Airways flew to only a single destination from Lisbon. Flight 501 departed in an hour. The next flight wasn’t until seven that evening.