The New Girl (Gabriel Allon #19)(29)

But why was the man in the tan overcoat sitting in a café next to the former director of security at the International School of Geneva? Villard’s compromised phone lay on the tabletop before him. Unit 8200 had routed the feed securely to Gabriel’s BlackBerry. The audio quality was crystalline—Gabriel could hear the clinking of cutlery and glass in the café and the chatter of pedestrians as they passed along the pavement—but there was a transmission delay of several seconds. It was like watching an old movie where sound and picture were not in sync. The two central characters in this film had yet to speak. It was possible, thought Gabriel, they never would.

Just then, there was a knock at his window, two firm raps of a policeman’s knuckle, followed by a curt wave of a gloved hand. Gabriel raised his own hand in a gesture of apology and eased away from the curb, into the swiftly flowing evening traffic. He made a series of rapid turns—right into the avenue du Mail, left on the rue Harry-Marc, left again on the boulevard Georges-Favon—and returned to the Place du Cirque.

A red traffic light gave him an excuse to loiter. Several pedestrians flowed through the crosswalk directly in front of him. One was a prosperous-looking man in a tan overcoat. A few paces behind him was Mikhail Abramov. Sarah was still at Café Remor. Her eyes were fixed on Lucien Villard, who was reaching toward the briefcase standing upright on the pavement.



He noticed him for the first time, the long-limbed man with pale skin and colorless eyes, sitting next to the attractive blonde at Café Remor. And now here he was again, the same man, following him through the darkness along the rue de la Corraterie. A car was following him, too—the same car that had been parked illegally in the Place du Cirque. He had seen nothing of the driver other than a smudge of gray at the temples.

But how had they found him? He was confident he had not been followed to Café Remor. Therefore, the logical explanation was that it was Villard, not him, who was under surveillance. It was no matter; Villard knew next to nothing. And in a very few minutes, he would no longer be a threat.

He removed his phone from his coat pocket and dialed a preloaded number. The conversation was brief, coded. When it was over he killed the connection and paused in a shop window. Glancing to his left, he saw the man with pale skin—and farther along the street, the car.

He waited for a tram to pass, crossed to the opposite side of the street, and went into a small movie house. The feature had just begun. He purchased a ticket and entered the darkened, half-empty theater. On the left side of the screen was the emergency exit. The alarm chirped loudly as he leaned on the panic latch and went once more into the night.

He found himself in a courtyard surrounded by a high wall. He scaled it effortlessly, dropped onto a cobbled street, and followed it through a passageway into the Old Town. A Piaggio motor scooter was parked outside an antiquarian bookshop, a leathered, helmeted figure perched atop the saddle. He climbed onto the back and wrapped his arms around a slender waist.



The fire alarm was still howling when Mikhail barged through the entrance of the cinema. He did not bother with the ruse of a ticket, and it took him two attempts to scale the wall of the rear courtyard. The street onto which he toppled was empty of traffic and pedestrians. Rising, he sprinted pell-mell along the cobbles until he reached a quaint square in the heart of the Old Town. There he saw the man in the tan overcoat climbing onto the back of a motorbike. Mikhail briefly considered drawing his weapon and taking the shot. Instead, he jogged back to the rue de la Corraterie, where Gabriel was waiting.

“Where is he?”

Mikhail explained about the motorbike.

“Did you see the driver?”

“She was wearing a helmet.”

“It was a woman? Are you sure?”

Mikhail nodded. “Where’s Villard?”

“He’s leaving Café Remor now.”

“Followed by an unarmed museum curator with limited training in street surveillance techniques.”

Gabriel put his foot to the floor and swung a U-turn in front of an approaching streetcar.

“You’re going the wrong way on a one-way street.”

“If I go the right way, it will take us ten minutes to get back to the Place du Cirque.”

Mikhail drummed his fingers nervously on the center console. “What do you suppose is in the briefcase?”

“I hope it’s money.”

“I hope so, too.”



Sarah’s first mistake was that she failed to pay the check in advance, a cardinal sin of the watcher’s trade. By the time she managed to catch the waiter’s indifferent eye, Lucien Villard had left the Place du Cirque and was a long way up the boulevard Georges-Favon. Fearful of losing him in the evening crowds, Sarah hastened too quickly after her quarry, which was how she made her second.

It happened at the intersection of the rue du Stand. Villard was about to cross the street, but when the light changed to red, he stopped abruptly and removed a packet of cigarettes. The breeze was from the Rh?ne, which was directly before him. Turning, he spotted Sarah gazing into the window of a wineshop, about thirty meters away. He stared at her unabashedly for a long moment, the cigarette between his lips, the lighter in his right hand, the briefcase in his left. The briefcase that had been given to him by the man in the tan overcoat.

All at once Villard flicked the cigarette to the pavement and took two violent steps toward Sarah. It was then she saw the flash of brilliant white light and felt a hurricane-force gust of superheated air rush over her. It lifted her from her feet and hurled her to the pavement. She lay very still, unable to move or breathe, wondering whether she was alive or already dead. She was aware only of shattered glass and human limbs and viscera. And blood. It was all around her, the blood. Some of it, she feared, was her own. And some of it was dripping on her from the bare limbs of the tree under which she had come to rest.