“Odessa was one way to get the advance team and some weapons into Russia. So now we have no one to buy guns and explosives for us,” Ben Essmann complained. “No one to get us safe hotel rooms. Or to arrange for our escape. At least we don’t have our best people. We’re forced to double up.”
The Russian Architect eyed a café table crowded with local men, summer versions of Nanook of the North. A waiter came, nodded a few times, then trundled off toward the kitchen like a sleepy, easily distracted yak.
“So Colonel Essmann,” the Architect said in a low voice. “Tell us, tell me, what do you think of our Mother Russia? Of Moscow? The city of something or other glorious or sacred, Pushkin or someone else once said.”
Colonel Essmann usually had no time for such banter and small talk—such testing. He answered this question, how-ever. The Soldier badly needed the help of the Engineer and Architect now. With the advance team dead, he needed the others committed body and soul to him.
“Who was the poet who said”—his deep brown eyes searched the eyes of the two other men—“what a strange, wonderful pleasure there is sometimes … seeing exactly what one had expected.”
The other two men smiled. There was truth in what the surprising military man had just said. Moscow was exactly what one expected. Huge. Either solemn or insane in its architecture. Forever on the verge of a blizzard, it seemed, even in July. Rude, shabby crowds everywhere. The happiest, most loved children you would find anywhere in the world.
“It’s said that we Soviets matriculate three million engineers a year,” the Architect smiled. “Intelligent country, eh?”
Now the Israeli Soldier smiled. “With all those engineers it’s lucky that a dunce cap like you could find work in Olympic Village.”
“Not really. The Party bureaucracy makes forgery and other forms of paper deceit easy. If you’re willing to take a few elementary risks … Like death by exsanguination in the cellars of Lubyanka Prison.”
As a toast to the dark jest, the three conspirators touched their glasses together.
They drank up, and then the Engineer unrolled a pen-and-ink diagram. The drawing was of a twelve-story section of a building inside Olympic Village.
The map showed the building’s plumbing, air-conditioning, and electrical systems. It was all wonderfully elaborate, with at least a thousand minuscule numbers on a single page.
“This will truly be something,” the Soldier said as he looked down at the drawing. “I have goose bumps all over my body just seeing your diagram. Simply with the knowledge of what we have to do here. Of all the care and preparation that have gone into making this work.”
The three men all grew strangely quiet. They began to stare solemnly into the flashing faces of the crowd passing through Olympic Village.
Everything was finally coming together. Now it would begin. At the Olympiad.
Book 2
Alix Rothschild
Part V
CHAPTER 53
Russia, July 14.
The swaying, bumping Russian passenger train was a dull, proletarian moss green. The locomotive had a big Pompeian red star on its mammoth forehead. It had smoky, oyster-white portraits of Nikolai Lenin and Karl Marx painted on its caboose.
Inside a cramped passenger compartment, Alix let the palette of the Latvian countryside filter through tight-fitting wire-rimmed eyeglasses.
The silver-rimmed glasses, a brown costume wig, and small amounts of bulk putty in her cheeks made Alix look older and much different, though not necessarily less attractive.
Especially among the squat, broad-faced Russian women riding the train.
The best description Alix could think of for her journey thus far—the only description that made any emotional sense—was petrifying. Petrifying, and unreal. As if she were once removed from her own body, and able to observe herself from an uncomfortable distance.
The interior of Soviet Russia! Alix’s mind drifted with the scenes flashing past her window. Grand, dust-brown bowls and plains. Herculean blond boys and bulky girls riding tractors and looking like Nebraska circa 1932. Two hundred and sixty million people, one-sixth of the world’s landmass. A hundred and forty thousand kilometers of Soviet railroad track, for God’s sake!
The spectacular, endless birch and pine forests were now falling under a heavy four-o’clock shadow. Great eagles were soaring overhead like small airplanes. The clumsy train itself burrowed onward like a wood mole in tall grass.
Once again, Alix couldn’t help wondering to herself exactly what she was doing in the middle of all this.
She wondered if her murdered parents would have understood and approved.
She wondered what David was thinking of her—then quickly pushed that thought completely from her mind.
If someone had asked her, if an interviewer had been able to ask Alix how it had all come to be, she wasn’t certain that she could have given a satisfactory answer. Three and a half years earlier, Alix remembered, as the train lumbered along, she had indeed been the Actress. “The great American perfume saleswoman,” Colonel Ben Essmann had called her when they’d first met in Jerusalem’s Hilton Hotel.
At that time, the spring of 1976, Colonel Essmann had been a noisy, living legend throughout Israel. At twenty-three a war hem and saboteur. Embarrassingly blustery and cocky, he’d informed Alix of a top-secret Mossad GAQ plot during their first casual meeting in the Hilton.
The secret was that he was about to lead a crack search-and-destroy team into Europe, where they would track down one of the Black September technicians who had engineered the Olympic massacre at Munich. Ben Essmann would then execute the fellah himself, he said. Perhaps right on Paris’s Faubourg Saint-Honoré More likely in the Marais, though, where the bastard lived with his Arab whore.
“It is a prohibitively dangerous mission,” Essmann told the American actress. “Probably I’ll be shot. Would you be so sympathetic as to go bed with me tonight before I leave?”
Alix had slapped the Israeli hard across his sunburned face.
“Why have you told me all of these secrets? You should be taken out on the street and shot for your brazen behavior. Or is it simply animal stupidity in your case? Too much exposure to the desert heat! Too much sleeping with camels and asses!”
At that, Ben Essmann gave forth a rare, good-natured, and somewhat winning laugh.
“Actually, my dear sexy-eyed Mix Rothschild—my mission is just yesterday finished.” The commando’s smile grew even wider. “Actually, my dear girl, Ali Jahir has just been shot eleven times in his head and black heart. By myself and a few others. Now what shall we staunch Israeli patriots do to celebrate such a feat of daring, eh?”
Alix took her purse off the bar. “I think I’ll go upstairs, and go to bed. Alone,” she emphasized. “I believe a hero such as yourself will surely pick up some other patriot to go to bed with tonight. After all, isn’t that what Jewish women have been put on this earth for? To bed down with great heroes and providers such as yourself. I’m very happy that the fellah is dead. I wish the same luck for you very soon.”
Not that evening, but shortly afterward, Colonel Ben Essmann began to pursue Alix fervently.
Eventually, Alix allowed Colonel Essmann a single “date”—chaperoned by a Jewish hero of another sort—her friend Michael Ben-Iban, who had met Alix at a conference of Jewish survivors in 1973, and who had first convinced Alix to help solicit funds for the continuing effort against Nazi war criminals.
When Ben-Iban had eventually suggested to Colonel Essmann an idea for a modern, expanded, Jewish counterterrorist group—a modernized successor to the Jewish Avengers and DIN—the Israeli military man had jumped in the air to show his enthusiasm. It had been exactly the kind of bold stroke Ben Essmann had been trying to sell to Mossad since he’d first come to Intelligence from the Israeli Army. It was a necessary deterrent both to the Arabs and to the still-influential Reich. Very soon, in fact, Colonel Essmann was calling the radical group his own idea.
>
Ben-Iban had subsequently established necessary connections with the larger, older Council, the worldwide Jewish association that closely watched over the globe with an eye to any situation potentially dangerous to the Jewish nation. Its sacred pledge was to remember the terrible Holocaust every last detail of it, and to protect against another unholy conflagration with their lives if need be.
The important financiers, the select Israeli generals and politicians who controlled the Council very reluctantly agreed that the radical counterterrorist group was needed during these dangerous times. The Council thus began to help under-write the subgroup’s activities.
For her part, Alix Rothschild had become one of the Council’s very best money-raisers. Not only did Alix contribute from her own considerable earnings, but she also had entrée and credibility at the homes of wealthy and important Jews all over the world.
At an emotion-packed meeting of the Council in the fall of 1978, a new leader was appointed to head up the previously defense-minded subgroup. Soon afterward, this new leader—the Führer—had conceived the idea for a controversial and dramatic strike that would prove to be one of the most important statements ever made about the Nazis.
A cataclysmic action that would finally reveal secrets about the Nazis even the most paranoid Zionist had never dreamed of. Terrible old Nazi secrets that pertained to life and death in the 1980s.
The long-awaited revenge for the Holocaust.
CHAPTER 54
Walking on almost any main Moscow boulevard made the Soldier feel physically small, painfully insignificant in the grand scheme of Russia’s past and present.
The mauve, gray, and gold buildings were as large as czarist palaces. The heroic Communist Party statues reached up as high as two thousand feet into the skyline. The ten- and twelve-lane main thoroughfares made Fifth Avenue and Oxford Street seem like side streets in comparison.
Now the Soldier ambled along Razin Street. He walked at a leisurely pace, appropriate for a tourist.
A large Intourist group, either British or American, passed by. The Russian tour leader was speaking comically stilted, noncolloquial English: “The wondrous construction of this our present Communist society … the gentle peace-loving nature of these, our good Soviet people.”
It was such preposterous nonsense, the Soldier didn’t know how the Russian guide could possibly keep a straight face. The peace-loving nature of the Soviet people was like the peace-loving nature of the wolverine.
Within sight of the behemoth Rossiya Hotel with its more than thirty-two hundred rooms, the largest hotel in Europe, Colonel Ben Essmann finally stopped at a convenient sidewalk stand. He bought a tiny cup of champagne, sold on the Razin Street curb like pretzels or hot dogs in America.
Surrounded by touches of old Moscow, large, onion-domed churches, gold Korsun crosses, and the Kremlin, Ben Essmann then sat on a bench and sipped his drink.
As he’d been instructed, he sat directly under a glaring red sign crammed full of Cyrillic letters.
The Soldier was acting as his own advance team now.
In the past few days, he’d arranged for thirteen hotel or apartment-building rooms within commuting distance of Olympic Village. He’d arranged for costumes to get his people inside the Village. He’d personally scouted the VIP hotels and the major sports complexes.
Two Russian men dressed in absurdly dowdy street clothes finally sat down on either side of Ben Essmann. The Russian men smelled of cabbage and raw fish. They each wore floppy refugee hats and baggy suits with excess shoulder stuffing.
In very poor, English, they began to explain the conditions under which they would sell the Soldier Soviet Army rifles, pistols, plastique explosives. The details of the sale and final exchange of goods were worked out.
Another very public site was selected for the important transfer of goods.
Before he would give the Russians half of the agreed-upon sum, however, the Soldier insisted on the early delivery of a single firearm. After more debate and haggling a second agreement was reached.
Before he left Moscow that afternoon, the Soldier would have one Soviet Army Dragunov sniper’s rifle in his possession.
As the tall, muscular Soldier retraced his steps back down Razin Street, he was feeling much larger and important. He was thinking that the Russian capital wasn’t so impressive after all.
CHAPTER 55
Shortly after 4:00 P.M., Alix’s train from Moscow lurched into the busy railroad depot in the Latvian city of Riga, birth-place of the ballet master Mikhail Baryshnikov, and an unlikely place to imagine dancers, Alix thought.
The afternoon sky had already lost its bright, silver-blue polish, Alix noticed as she got off the huffing, puffing train. Heavy chunks of gray cloud were sliding over the city like dirty ice on wheels.
In the Russian train square itself, Alix was met by a stern-faced chauffeur and a woman cook named Maria, who was holding a bouquet of flowers for her. The puffy Chaika automobile looked like an American Packard out of the 1940s.
The couple hugged Alix convincingly, as if she were a young woman returning from a year away at university.
Her ride in the Chaika lasted less than twenty minutes through the salt-cured, resort part of the seaport city.
There were boathouses everywhere, and squawking seagulls overhead. Little dinky cottages, isbas, with ginger-bread facades and great overgrown vegetable gardens. The Russians apparently went on vacation, Alix thought to herself, and planted little cabbages and turnips for their relaxation.
Then Alix found herself standing outside the imposing and quite beautiful dacha of the Soviet writer Lev Ginzburg. She was, in fact, being greeted like Catherine the Great by the sparkly-eyed, eighty-five-year-old genius.
In their high-spirited conversation in the front yard, standing in the shadow of sixty-foot pine and birch trees, Alix was told that the large czarist estate, as well as the servants, the Chaika, and a snowplow, were provided to Lev Ginzburg by the Soviet Writers Union.
In return for the largesse, Ginzburg told her, all he had to do was concoct mesmerizing fairy-tale collections of TV scenarios for the beloved children all over the Soviet Union.
“And now you’re willing to give all this up?” Alix stared into the eyes of the diminutive, almost pretty, white-haired man.
The Russian seemed a little surprised by the question. “Oh yes. Of course. Come inside now. You’ll be staying in the very same room where I work. Used to world eh? You see, I’ve absolutely run out of fairy tales, anyway.”
The Russian writer’s workroom was unusually large for a dacha. “It’s as, tall as one of my stories.” Lev Ginzburg grinned at Alix. His little cherry-red eyes were sparkling rubies.
Alix looked all around the magical room. She was feeling magical herself.
Ten-foot-high bookshelves took up two of the workroom walls completely. There was a cluttered table. A miniature four-poster bed.
There was a clutter of Russian folk art: icons and primitive Siberian wood carvings. A Bokhara carpet. A samovar, brewing dark, fragrant tea.
Large French doors on the far wall led to a veranda that looked down on a gray, deserted Baltic Sea beach.
The cook, Maria, brought cognac, sour bread, and hot hors d’oeuvres for Alix. She built a small fire.
Shortly after Maria left Alix, the Newspaperman and the Lawyer came, both of them well-known and successful in their fields. After much hugging and a few tears, they began to read over the demands that had been prepared for their day at the twenty-second Olympiad in Moscow.
Alix herself typed out the demands, changing phrases that struck them as inexact, or melodramatic, or undramatic. The important message had to be exact. People had to understand once and for all.
Just reading the accusations, charges, and proposals aloud made Alix tremble. There was horrifying truth written down. Justice was the cry from every page. The demands formed an important document about who the Nazis had been—and who they were now.
> At seven o’clock in the evening, the chauffeur came upstairs with a pair of thick-bladed, all-purpose Russian scissors. While Alix and the others continued to talk, the Russian unceremoniously chopped off her black hair, the Rothschild trademark. The man clipped and chopped until Alix looked like a boy.
“Let me look, please,” she asked.
Alix stared into a little hand mirror, and she had to laugh to keep herself from silly crying.
Her hair had been cut off. Just like her mother’s.
CHAPTER 56
The Strauss house on Upper North Avenue in Scarsdale reminded David of a landlocked sailing ship. It existed with no apparent purpose. There were no lights. Over the summer the grass had grown knee high. No one came or left except for a single gimpy sailor: the housekeeper.
That morning David shaved and showered in the downstairs bath, with its view out over the Four Corners Texaco station.
As he stared down on pretty Lincoln Avenue—the hair dryer parting his hair in great clumps, showing patches of pale white scalp—things that Harry Callaghan had recently told David flashed into his mind.
First of all, Harry had told him that the terrorist group had been the ones who had killed Elena and Nick. The shooting of Heather had been an accident.
The Strausses had been supporting the secret group—which David knew. Then Nick had apparently convinced Elena to stop her heavy financial contributions. In early April, Nick and Elena had actually begun preliminary talks with Intelligence people in Washington. They’d broken the thirty-five-year silence of the secret defense group. They had been fully prepared to expose what they knew of the ultimate plot.
Elena and Nick had been that frightened by the final plan for Dachau Two, David thought now. What in the name of God was it going to be? And wasn’t it insanely ironic that Elena had kept him out of the dangerous group, while Alix had been recruited by the German Jew Ben Iban.