Prince of Fire by Daniel Silva Read Free Book Online Page A

I’m leaving.”
    “The fewer people who know, the better.”
    “I don’t care,” said Gabriel. “I owe it to him.”
    “Do what you need to do. Just do it quickly.”
    “What about the house? There are things—”
    “Extraction will see to your things. By the time they finish, there’ll be no trace of you here.” Shamron, in spite of Gabriel’s admonition against smoking, lit a cigarette. He held the match aloft for a moment, then ceremoniously blew it out. “It will be as though you never existed.”
    S HAMRON GRANTED HIM one hour. Gabriel, with Chiara’s Beretta in his pocket, slipped from the back door of the church and made his way to Castello. He had lived there during his apprenticeship and knew the tangled streets of the sestière well. He walked in a section where tourists never went and many of the houses were uninhabited. His route, deliberately circuitous, took him through several underground sottoportegi , where it was impossible for a pursuer to hide. Once he purposely led himself into an enclosed corte , from which there was only one way to enter and leave. After twenty minutes, he was certain no one was following him.
    Francesco Tiepolo kept his office in San Marco, on the Viale 22 Marzo. Gabriel found him seated behind the large oaken table he used as his desk, his large body folded over a stack of paperwork. Were it not for the notebook computer and electric light, he might have been a figure in a Renaissance painting. He looked up at Gabriel and smiled through his tangled black beard. On the streets of Venice, tourists often mistook him for Luciano Pavarotti. Lately he’d taken to posing for photographs and singing a few lines of “Non ti scordar di me” very badly.
    He had been a great restorer once; now he was a businessman. Indeed, Tiepolo’s was the most successful restoration firm in the entire Veneto. He spent most of his day preparing bids for various projects or locked in political battles with the Venetian officials charged with the care of the city’s artistic and architectural treasures. Once a day he popped into the Church of San Crisostomo to prod his gifted chief restorer, the recalcitrant and reclusive Mario Delvecchio, into working faster. Tiepolo was the only person in the art world other than Julian Isherwood who knew the truth about the talented Signore Delvecchio.
    Tiepolo suggested they walk around the corner for a glass of prosecco, then, confronted with Gabriel’s reluctance to leave the office, he fetched a bottle of ripasso from the next room instead. Gabriel scanned the framed photographs arrayed on the wall behind the Venetian’s desk. There was a new photograph of Tiepolo with his good friend, His Holiness Pope Paul VII. Pietro Lucchesi had been the Patriarch of Venice before reluctantly moving to the Vatican to become leader of the world’s one billion Roman Catholics. The photo showed Tiepolo and the pope seated in the dining room of Tiepolo’s gloriously restored palazzo overlooking the Grand Canal. What it didn’t show was that Gabriel, at that moment, had been seated to the pope’s left. Two years earlier, with a bit of help from Tiepolo, he had saved the pope’s life and destroyed a grave threat to his papacy. He hoped that Chiara and the team from Extraction had found the Hanuka card the Holy Father had sent him in December.
    Tiepolo poured out two glasses of the blood-red ripasso and slid one across the tabletop toward Gabriel. Half of his own wine disappeared in one swallow. Only in his work was Tiepolo meticulous. In all other things—food, drink, his many women—Francesco Tiepolo was prone to extravagance and excess. Gabriel leaned forward and quietly told Tiepolo the news—that his enemies had found him in Venice, that he had no choice but to leave the city immediately, before he could finish the Bellini. Tiepolo smiled sadly and closed his eyes.
    “Is there no other way?”
    Gabriel shook his head. “They know where I live. They know