GABRIEL LUNGED INTO a narrow street as the gun spit three tongues of fire. Three rounds struck the cornerstones of a building. Gabriel lowered his head and started to run.

The motorino was traveling too fast to make the turn. It skidded past the entrance of the street, then wobbled around in an awkward circle, allowing Gabriel a few critical seconds to put some distance between himself and his attacker. He turned right, onto a street that ran parallel to the Via Giulia, then made a sudden left. His plan was to head for the Corso Vittorio Emanuale II, one of Rome ’s largest thoroughfares. There would be traffic on the street and pedestrians on the pavements. On the Corso he could find a place to conceal himself.

The whine of the motorino grew louder. Gabriel glanced over his shoulder. The bike was still following him and closing the distance at an alarming rate. He threw himself into a headlong sprint, hands clawing at the air, breath harsh and ragged. The headlamp fell upon him. He saw his own shadow on the paving stones in front of him, a flailing madman.

A second bike entered the street directly in front of him and skidded to a halt. The helmeted rider drew a weapon. So this is how it would be-a trap, two killers, no hope of escape. He felt like a target in a shooting gallery, waiting to be toppled.

He kept running, into the light. His arms rose, and he glimpsed his own hands, contorted and taut, the hands of a tormented figure in an Expressionist painting. He realized he was shouting. The sound echoed from the stucco and brickwork of the surrounding buildings and vibrated within his own ears, so that he could no longer hear the sound of the motorbike at his back. An image flashed before his eyes: his mother at the side of a Polish road with Erich Radek’s gun to her temple. Only then did he realize he was screaming in German. The language of his dreams. The language of his nightmares.

The second assassin leveled the weapon, then lifted the visor of the helmet.

Gabriel could hear the sound of his own name.

“Get down! Get down! Gabriel! ”

He realized it was the voice of Chiara.

He threw himself to the street.

Chiara’s shots sailed overhead and struck the oncoming motorino. The bike veered out of control and slammed into the side of a building. The assassin catapulted over the handlebars and tumbled along the paving stones. The gun came to rest a few feet from Gabriel. He reached for it.

“No, Gabriel! Leave it! Hurry! ”

He looked up and saw Chiara holding out her hand to him. He climbed on the back of the motorino and clung childlike to her hips as the bike roared up the Corso toward the river.

SHAMRON HAD A rule about safe flats: there was to be no physical contact between male and female agents. That evening, in an Office flat in the north of Rome, near a lazy bend in the Tiber, Gabriel and Chiara violated Shamron’s rule with an intensity born of the fear of death. Only afterward did Gabriel bother to ask Chiara how she had found him.

“Shamron told me you were coming to Rome. He asked me to watch your back. I agreed, of course. I have a very personal interest in your continued survival.”

Gabriel wondered how he had failed to notice he was being tailed by a five-foot-ten-inch Italian goddess, but then, Chiara Zolli was very good at her work.

“I wanted to join you for lunch at Piperno,” she said mischievously. “I didn’t think it was a terribly good idea.”

“How much do you know about the case?”

“Only that my worst fears about Vienna turned out to be true. Why don’t you tell me the rest?”

Which he did, beginning with his flight from Vienna and concluding with the information he had picked up earlier that night from Shimon Pazner.

“So who sent that man to Rome to kill you?”

“I think it’s safe to assume it was the same person who engineered the murder of Max Klein.”

“How did they find you here?”

Gabriel had been asking himself that same question. His suspicions fell upon the rosy-cheeked Austrian rector of the Anima, Bishop Theodor Drexler.

“So where are we going next?” Chiara asked.

“We?”

“Shamron told me to watch your back. You want me to disobey a direct order from the Memuneh?”

“He told you to watch me in Rome.”

“It was an open-ended assignment,” she replied, her tone defiant.

Gabriel lay there for a moment, stroking her hair. Truth was, he could use a traveling companion and a second pair of eyes in the field. Given the obvious risks involved, he would have preferred someone other than the woman he loved. But then, she had proven herself a valuable partner.

There was a secure telephone on the bedside table. He dialed Jerusalem and woke Moshe Rivlin from a heavy sleep. Rivlin gave him the name of a man in Buenos Aires, along with a telephone number and an address in the barrio San Telmo. Then Gabriel called Aerolineas Argentinas and booked two business-class seats on a flight the following evening. He hung up the receiver. Chiara rested her cheek against his chest.

“You were shouting something back there in that alley when you were running toward me,” she said. “Do you remember what you were saying?”

He couldn’t. It was as if he had awakened unable to recall the dreams that disturbed his sleep.

“You were calling out to her,” Chiara said.

“Who?”

“Your mother.”

He remembered the image that had flashed before his eyes during that mind-bending flight from the man on the motorino. He supposed it was indeed possible he had been calling out to his mother. Since reading her testimony he had been thinking of little else.

“Are you sure it was Erich Radek who murdered those poor girls in Poland?”

“As sure as onecan be sixty years after the fact.”

“And if Ludwig Vogel is actually Erich Radek?”

Gabriel reached up and switched off the lamp.

23 ROME

THE VIA DELLA Pace was deserted. The Clockmaker stopped at the gates of the Anima and shut down the engine of the motorino. He reached out, his hand trembling, and pressed the button of the intercom. There was no reply. He rang the bell again. This time an adolescent voice greeted him in Italian. The Clockmaker, in German, asked to see the rector.

“I’m afraid it’s not possible. Please telephone in the morning to make an appointment, and Bishop Drexler will be happy to see you. Buonanotte, signore.”

The Clockmaker leaned hard on the intercom button. “I was told to come here by a friend of the bishop’s from Vienna. It’s an emergency.”

“What was the man’s name?”

The Clockmaker answered the question truthfully.

A silence, then: “I’ll be down in a moment, signore.”

The Clockmaker opened his jacket and examined the puckered wound just below his right clavicle. The heat of the round had cauterized the vessels near the skin. There was little blood, just an intense throbbing and the chills of shock and fever. A small-caliber weapon, he guessed, most likely a.22. Not the kind of weapon to inflict serious internal damage. Still, he needed a doctor to remove the round and thoroughly clean the wound before sepsis set in.

He looked up. A cassocked figure appeared in the forecourt and warily approached the gate-a novice, a boy of perhaps fifteen, with the face of an angel. “The rector says it is not convenient for you to come to the seminary at this time,” the novice said. “The rector suggests that you find somewhere else to go tonight.”

The Clockmaker drew his Glock and pointed it at the angelic face.

“Open the gate,” he whispered. “Now.”

“YES, BUT WHY did you have to send him here?” The bishop’s voice rose suddenly, as if he were warning a congregation of souls about the dangers of sin. “It would be better for all involved if he left Rome immediately.”

“He can’t travel, Theodor. He needs a doctor and a place to rest.”