“We really should call the police,” said the elderly Austrian.
“Probably,” agreed Gabriel. “But we’re not going to.”
“You’re not a criminal, are you?”
“Do I look like a criminal?”
“You do, actually.”
It was a walk of nearly a kilometer to Herr Gruber’s neat little cottage in Falkenstein. Inside, it smelled of dog and mothballs. He fetched a first aid kit, and Gabriel, after rolling up the left leg of his ruined trousers, applied the antibiotic ointment and the field dressing. Then he borrowed Herr Gruber’s phone a second time and rang a local taxi company.
The car soon appeared, driven by a woman who spoke without cease during the hour-long journey to Vienna. Gabriel paid the fare in cash—the kidnappers had allowed him to retain possession of his billfold and passport—and then made his way to the Kärntnerstrasse, Vienna’s famed pedestrian shopping street, where he purchased toiletries, a change of clothing, and a new iPhone. The first call he placed was to Edward Knight in London.
“Anything?” he asked.
“No,” replied Knight. “Nothing at all.”
“Are you sure they received the money?”
“They said they did, but perhaps you should have a word with your cyber specialist.”
She was still at the Baur au Lac Hotel in Zurich, where she had spent a sleepless night attempting without success to penetrate the data network of CyproBank of Nicosia. Gabriel gave her a quick update, then instructed her to pack her bags.
“Where should I go?” she asked.
“I’m told Mykonos is lovely this time of year.”
“What about Alice?”
“There is no Alice,” he answered. “Not yet, at least.”
There was a small hotel near St. Stephen’s Cathedral where Gabriel, in another lifetime, had passed a tense Friday afternoon beforekilling two Hezbollah suicide bombers outside Vienna’s main synagogue. Shopping bags in hand, he checked into the same hotel and, as misfortune would have it, was assigned to his old room. He stayed there long enough to shower and change and book a seat on the next British Airways flight to London. Then, after informing Chiara of his whereabouts and travel plans, he checked out of the hotel and, bidding the doorman a pleasant morning, went into the street.
The flight was scheduled to depart at half past two, leaving Gabriel with an hour to kill. He should have headed straight to Schwechat Airport, but against all better judgment he decided to lead himself on a walking tour of the Innere Stadt instead. Everywhere he turned there were reminders of his past. There was the famous coffeehouse where he had once come face-to-face with Erich Radek, colleague of Adolf Eichmann and tormentor of Gabriel’s mother. And the little café where each afternoon, when he had finished work on the painting he was restoring in the cathedral, he used to take his young son for gelato. And the popular Italian restaurant where the child had eaten a last meal of buttered spaghetti while his mother, distracted by the television behind the bar, watched Iraqi Scud missiles falling on Tel Aviv.
Gabriel’s last stop was the small square in the Jewish quarter where their car had been parked that night. He had strapped the child into his seat, he had kissed his wife.One last kiss...Even now he could taste the wine on her lips and hear the hesitation of the starter when she turned the key. Then, in a flash of brilliant white light, she and the child were lost to him forever. Somehow, he thought, the kidnappers of Alice Winter had known this.
Good morning, Mr. Allon. Welcome back to Austria...
Unshed tears blurred his vision as he left the square and went in search of a taxi. He found one on the Rotenturmstrasse andinstructed the driver to take him to the airport. His flight departed on schedule and touched down at Heathrow at four o’clock, leaving him just enough time to make the 4:32 train from Heathrow Central to Exeter. Chiara and the children were waiting outside in the Range Rover when he emerged from the station. He slid into the passenger seat, pressed his lips to Chiara’s cheek, then telephoned Edward Knight.
“Nothing,” said the billionaire, and rang off.
23
Gwennap Head
It began, like most things these days, with a few pithy words on a social media platform controlled by a reactionary billionaire. The culprit was a gadfly British podcaster who specialized in celebrity gossip and scandal. She had discovered, thanks to her reputedly impeccable sources, that Alice Winter, the dazzling wife of real estate mogul Edward Knight, had vanished while on holiday on the island of Ibiza. The brief item caught the attention of a reporter from one of the lesser London tabloids, and with a single phone call to the Policía Nacional he confirmed its accuracy. His story appeared on the paper’s website shortly before seven the following morning, and by lunchtime it was all anyone in Britain was talking about.
Attempts to reach Edward Knight would prove unsuccessful, but at half past four that afternoon he was spotted entering New Scotland Yard, headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, accompanied by a team of high-priced lawyers. The Met’s press spokeswoman declined to characterize the nature of the discussions, saying only that Knight had been fully cooperative. No, she added pointedly, the billionaire was not considered a suspect in his wife’s disappearance.
But what, precisely, had happened to Alice Winter? And why was her disappearance coming to light only now, some three weeks afterthe fact? It emerged the next day, thanks to an unauthorized press leak from Scotland Yard, that she had been abducted during her Ibizan holiday—and that her husband, like many exceedingly wealthy men before him, had decided to quietly meet the demands of the kidnappers rather than involve the authorities. A prominent figure in London’s private security industry theorized that the billionaire had likely retained the services of an experienced kidnap-and-ransom specialist to negotiate the terms of the deal. Another expert suggested that the ransom payment might well have exceeded the $17 million demanded by the kidnappers of John Paul Getty III, grandson of the oil tycoon and art collector.
Edward Knight, for his part, had nothing to say on the subject of ransom, or much else, for that matter. Holed up in his mansion in Hans Place in Knightsbridge, he issued a single written statement, pleading with the kidnappers to release his wife at once. But when three additional days passed with no sign of her, friends and associates of the billionaire feared the worst. So too did authorities in Spain, where kidnappings by Basque separatists had once been commonplace. The payment of ransom, said one former counterterrorism official, did not guarantee the release of the hostage. Indeed, in some instances, it placed the hostage in even greater danger. The Metropolitan Police spokeswoman, while refusing to confirm that a ransom had in fact been paid, gently criticized the official’s remarks as “unhelpful.”
Britain would awaken the following morning to a report in the same lesser tabloid that Alice Winter had been found wandering dazed and disoriented through the streets of Barcelona. A hasty retraction soon followed. Yes, a British woman had been discovered in Barcelona, but her condition was the result of nothing more perilous than a night of heavy drinking. The Madrid newspaperEl Paíspublished a lengthy follow-up story replete with harrowing anecdotes of English debauchery on Spanish soil. The leader of the British far right responded by calling on his fellow countrymen to cancel their summer holidays in Spain and remain in England instead. The leader of Spain’s growing anti-tourism movement declared it a fine idea.
Lost in the unseemly Anglo-Spanish spat was the fact that a human life was at stake, a life that the British press placed under a microscope—her middle-class suburban upbringing, her years at Cambridge, her short-lived career in journalism, the extramarital affair that ended Edward Knight’s first marriage. The billionaire issued another statement, this time asking for privacy. The press responded by turning their sights on Knight’s opaque real estate empire and his repeated brushes with His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. A loose-cannon legal analyst on the American airwaves wondered whether Knight might have played a role in his wife’s disappearance, a theory that quickly gained traction on social media. When a wife vanished, the thinking went, the husband was usually to blame.
