The English Assassin (8 page)

“In war there are casualties.”

“Surveillance and intimidation is one thing—killing is quite another. It’s critical we use someone who can’t be linked to the Council in any way. Surely, in your other line of work, you’ve come across people like this.”

“I have.”

The old man sighed.

Gerhardt Peterson pulled out the earpiece and headed back to Zurich.

CORSICA

T
HERE WAS
an old joke on Corsica that the island’s notoriously treacherous roads had been designed jointly by Machiavelli and the Marquis de Sade. Yet the Englishman had never minded driving there. Indeed, he tore around the island with a certain fatalistic abandon that had earned him the reputation of being something of a madman. At the moment he was racing along a windswept highway on the western edge of the island through a thick blanket of marine fog. Five miles on, he turned inland. As he climbed into the hills, the fog gave way to a clear blue afternoon sky. The autumn sunlight brought out the contrasting shades of green in the olive trees and Laricio pine. In the shadow of the trees were dense patches of gorse and brier and rockrose, the legendary Corsican undergrowth known as the
macchia
that had concealed bandits and murderers for centuries. The Englishman
lowered his window. The warm scent of rosemary washed over his face.

Ahead of him stood a hill town, a cluster of sand-colored houses with red-tile roofs huddled around a bell tower, half in shadow, half in brilliant sunlight. In the background rose the mountains, ice-blue snow on the highest peaks. Ten years ago, when he had first settled here, the children would point at him with their index fingers and pinkies, the Corsican way of warding off the evil eye of a stranger. Now they smiled and waved as he sped through the town and headed up the cul-de-sac valley toward his villa.

Along the way he passed a
paesanu
working a small patch of vegetables at the roadside. The man peered at the Englishman, black eyes smoldering beneath the brim of his broad hat, and signaled his recognition with an almost imperceptible wave of his first two fingers. The old
paesanu
was one of the Englishman’s adopted clansmen. Farther up the road, a young boy called Giancomo stepped into his path and waved his arms for the Englishman to stop.

“Welcome home. Was your trip good?”

“Very good.”

“What did you bring me?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether you watched my villa for me while I was away.”

“Of course I did, just as I promised.”

“Did anyone come?”

“No, I saw no one.”

“You’re quite sure?”

The boy nodded. From his suitcase the Englishman removed a beautiful satchel, handmade of fine
Spanish leather, and handed it to the boy. “For your books—so you won’t lose them on the way home from school anymore.”

The boy pulled the satchel to his nose and smelled the new leather. Then he said: “Do you have any cigarettes?”

“You won’t tell your mother?”

“Of course not!”

The men pretended to rule Corsica, but the real power lay in the hands of the mothers. The Englishman handed the boy a half-empty packet.

He slipped the cigarettes into his satchel. “One more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Don Orsati wishes to speak with you.”

“When did you see him?”

“This morning.”

“Where?”

“At the café in the village.”

“Where is he now?”

“At the café in the village.”

Orsati lives a stressful life,
thought the Englishman.

“Invite the don to my villa for lunch. But tell him that if he expects to eat, he should bring along some food.”

The boy smiled and scampered off, the leather satchel flailing behind him like a banner. The Englishman slipped the jeep into gear and continued up the road. About a half mile from his villa, he slammed on his brakes, and the jeep skidded to a stop amid a cloud of red dust.

Standing in the center of the narrow track was a large male goat. He had the markings of a palomino and a red beard. Like the Englishman, he was scarred
from old battles. The goat detested the Englishman and blocked the road to his villa whenever it pleased him. The Englishman had dreamed many times of ending the conflict once and for all with the Glock pistol he kept in his glove box. But the beast belonged to Don Casabianca, and if he were ever harmed there would be a feud.

The Englishman honked his horn. Don Casabianca’s goat threw back his head and glared at him defiantly. The Englishman had two choices, both unpleasant. He could wait out the goat, or he could try to move him.

He took a long look over his shoulder to make sure no one was watching. Then he threw open his door and charged the goat, waving his hands and screaming like a lunatic, until the beast gave ground and darted into the shelter of the
macchia.
A fitting place for him, thought the Englishman—the
macchia,
the place where all thieves and bandits eventually reside.

He got back into his jeep and headed up the road to his villa, thinking about the terrible shame of it. A highly accomplished assassin, yet he couldn’t get to his own home without first suffering a humiliation at the hands of Don Casabianca’s wretched goat.

I
T
had never taken much to spark a feud on Corsica. An insult. An accusation of cheating in the marketplace. Dissolution of an engagement. The pregnancy of an unmarried woman. Once, in the Englishman’s village, there had been a forty-year feud over the keys to the church. After the initial spark, unrest quickly followed. An ox would be killed. The owner of the ox would retaliate by killing a mule or a flock of sheep. A prized olive tree would be chopped down. A fence toppled. A house would burn. Then the murders
would start. And on it would go, sometimes for a generation or more, until the aggrieved parties had settled their differences or given up the fight in exhaustion.

On Corsica most men were all too willing to do their killing themselves. But there were always some who needed others to do the blood work for them: notables who were too squeamish to get their hands dirty or unwilling to risk arrest or exile; women who could not kill for themselves or had no male kin to do the deed on their behalf. People like these relied on professionals: the
taddunaghiu.
Usually they turned to the Orsati clan.

The Orsatis had fine land with many olive trees, and their oil was regarded as the sweetest in all of Corsica. But they did more than produce fine olive oil. No one knew how many Corsicans had died at the hands of Orsati assassins over the ages—least of all the Orsatis themselves—but local lore placed the number in the thousands. It might have been significantly higher if not for the clan’s rigorous vetting process. In the old days, the Orsatis operated by a strict code. They refused to carry out a killing unless satisfied that the party before them had indeed been wronged and blood vengeance was required.

Anton Orsati had taken over the helm of the family business in troubled times. The French authorities had managed to eradicate feuding and the vendetta in all but the most isolated pockets of the island. Few Corsicans required the services of the
taddunaghiu
any longer. But Anton Orsati was a shrewd businessman. He knew he could either fold his tent and become a mere producer of excellent olive oil or expand his base of operations and look for opportunities elsewhere. He decided on the second course and took his business
across the water. Now, his band of assassins was regarded as the most reliable and professional in Europe. They roamed the continent, killing on behalf of wealthy men, criminals, insurance cheats, and sometimes even governments. Most of the men they killed deserved to die, but competition and the exigencies of the modern age had required Anton Orsati to forsake the old code of his ancestors. Every job offer that crossed his desk was accepted, no matter how distasteful, as long as it did not place the life of one of his assassins in unreasonable danger.

Orsati always found it slightly amusing that his most skilled employee was not a Corsican but an Englishman from Highgate in North London. Only Orsati knew the truth about him. That he had served in the famed Special Air Service. That he had killed men in Northern Ireland and Iraq. That his former masters believed him to be dead. Once, the Englishman showed Orsati a clipping from a London newspaper. His obituary. A very useful thing in this line of work, thought Orsati. People don’t often look for a dead man.

He may have been born an Englishman, but Orsati always thought he had been given the restless soul of a Corsican. He spoke the dialect as well as Orsati, mistrusted outsiders, and despised all authority. At night he would sit in the village square with the old men, scowling at the boys on their skateboards and grumbling about how the young had no respect for the old ways. He was a man of honor—sometimes too much honor for Orsati’s taste. Still, he was a superb assassin, the finest Orsati had ever known. He had been trained by the most efficient killers on the planet, and Orsati had learned much from him. He
was also perfectly suited to certain assignments on the continent, which is why Anton Orsati came calling on the Englishman’s villa that afternoon with an armful of groceries.

O
RSATI
was a descendant of a family of notables, but in dress and appetite he was not much different than the
paesanu
working his patch down the valley road. He wore a bleached white shirt, unbuttoned to the center of his barrel chest, and dusty leather sandals. The “lunch” that he brought with him consisted of a loaf of coarse bread, a flask of olive oil, a chunk of aromatic Corsican ham, and a lump of strong cheese. The Englishman provided the wine. The afternoon was warm, so they ate outside on the terrace overlooking the cul-de-sac valley, in the dappled shade of a pair of towering Corsican pines.

Orsati handed the Englishman a check bearing the imprint of Orsati Olive Oil. All of Orsati’s assassins were officially employees of the company. The Englishman was a vice president for marketing, whatever that meant. “Your share of the fee for the Spain assignment.” Orsati swirled a piece of the bread in oil and shoved it into his mouth. “Any problems?”

“The girl was working for the Spanish security service.”

“Which girl?”

“The girl Navarra was seeing.”

“Oh, shit. What did you do?”

“She saw my face.”

Orsati contemplated this news while he sawed off a slice of the ham and placed it on the Englishman’s plate. Neither man liked collateral casualties. They were usually bad for business.

“How are you feeling?”

“I’m tired.”

“Still not sleeping well?”

“Not while I’m in a foreign country killing a man.”

“And here?”

“Better.”

“You should try to get some rest tonight instead of sitting up all hours with the old ones in the village.”

“Why?”

“Because I have another job for you.”

“I just finished a job. Give it to one of the others.”

“It’s too sensitive.”

“You have a dossier?”

Orsati finished his lunch and swam lazy laps in the pool while the Englishman read. When he finished, he looked up. “What has this man done to deserve to die?”

“Apparently, he stole something quite valuable.”

The Englishman closed the file. He had no compunction about killing someone who stole for a living. In the Englishman’s opinion, a thief was earth’s lowest life-form.

“So why does this job require me?”

“Because the contractors would like the target dead and his business destroyed. The men who trained you at Hereford taught you how to use explosives. My men are comfortable with more conventional weapons.”

“Where am I going to get a bomb?”

Orsati climbed out of the pool and vigorously toweled his thick silver hair. “Do you know Pascal Debré?”

Unfortunately, the Englishman did know Pascal Debré. He was an arsonist who did jobs for a
Marseilles-based criminal enterprise. Debré would have to be handled carefully.

“Debré knows to expect you. He’ll give you whatever you need for the job.”

“When do I leave?”

COSTA DE PRATA, PORTUGAL

B
Y ALL APPEARANCES
the woman who had settled in the refurbished old monastery on the steep hill overlooking the sea had taken a vow to live the sequestered existence of an ascetic. For a long time no one in the village knew even her name. Senhora Rosa, the scandalmonger checkout clerk at the market, decided she was a woman scorned, and she inflicted her dubious theory on anyone unfortunate enough to pass by her register. It was Rosa who christened the woman Our Lady of the Hillside. The moniker clung to her, even after her real name became known.