Read The English Assassin for Free Online Page A

the first time, not a pleasant smile, more like a tear in a scrap of paper.
    “Twenty-five years ago, you murdered a Palestinian playwright living in Zurich named Ali Abdel Hamidi. You slipped out of the country an hour after the killing and were probably back home in your bed in Tel Aviv before midnight. This time, I’m afraid you’re not going anywhere.”

4
    ZURICH
     
    S OMETIME AFTER MIDNIGHTGabriel was moved from the interrogation room to a holding cell in an adjacent wing of the building. It was small and institutional gray, with a bare mattress mounted on a steel frame and a rust-stained toilet that never stopped running. Overhead, a single lightbulb buzzed behind a mesh cage. His untouched dinner—a fatty pork sausage, some wilted greens, and a pile of greasy potatoes—sat on the ground next to the door like room service waiting to be collected. Gabriel supposed the pork sausage had been Peterson’s idea of a joke.
    He tried to picture the events he knew were taking place outside these walls. Peterson had contacted his superior, his superior had contacted the Foreign Ministry. By now word had probably reached Tel Aviv. The prime minister would be livid. He had enough problems: the West Bank in flames, the peace process in tatters, his brittle coalition crumbling. The last thing he needed was a kidon, even a former kidon, behind bars in Switzerland—yet another Office scandal waiting to explode across the front pages of the world’s newspapers.
    And so the lights were certainly burning with urgency tonight in the anonymous office block on Tel Aviv’s King Saul Boulevard. And Shamron? Had the call gone out to his lakeside fortress in Tiberias? Was he in or out these days? It was always hard to tell with Shamron. He’d been dug out of his precarious retirement three or four times, called back to deal with this crisis or that, tapped to serve on some dubious advisory panel or to sit in wizened judgment on a supposedly independent fact-finding committee. Not long ago he’d been appointed interim chief of the service, the position he’d held the first time he was sent into the Judean wilderness of retirement. Gabriel wondered whether that term had ended. With Shamron the word interim could mean a hundred days or a hundred years. He was Polish by birth but had a Bedouin’s elastic sense of time. Gabriel was Shamron’s kidon. Shamron would handle it, retired or not.
    The old man . . . He’d always been “the old man,” even during his brief fling with middle age. Where’s the old man? Anyone seen the old man? Run for the hills! The old man is coming this way! Now he was an old man, but in Gabriel’s mind’s eye he always appeared as the menacing little figure who’d come to see him one afternoon in September 1972 between classes at Betsal’el. An iron bar of a man. You could almost hear him clanking as he walked. He had known everything about Gabriel. That he had been raised on an agricultural kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley and that he had a passionate hatred of farming. That he was something of a lone wolf, even though he was already married at the time to a fellow art student named Leah Savir. That his mother had found the strength to survive Auschwitz but was no match for the cancer that ravaged her body; that his father had survived Auschwitz too but was no match for the Egyptian artillery shell that blew him to bits in the Sinai. Shamron knew from Gabriel’s military service that he was nearly as good with a gun as he was with a paintbrush.
    “You watch the news?”
    “I paint.”
    “You know about Munich? You know what happened to our boys there?”
    “Yeah, I heard.”
    “You’re not upset by it?”
    “Of course, but I’m not more upset because they’re athletes or because it’s the Olympics.”
    “You can still be angry.”
    “At who?”
    “At the Palestinians. At the Black September terrorists who walk around with the blood of your people on their hands.”
    “I never get