“She speaks fluent German and Arabic.”
“What kind of approach are you thinking about?”
“Hard, I’m afraid.”
“And the flag?”
“I can assure you it won’t be blue and white.”
Navot smiled. When he had worked in the field as a katsa, false-flag operations were his specialty. He routinely posed as an officer of German intelligence when recruiting spies from Arab countries or from within the ranks of terrorist organizations. Convincing an Arab to betray his country, or his cause, was easier if the Arab didn’t know he was working for the State of Israel.
“What are you planning to do with Bella?” he asked.
“She wants to go into the field. I told her it was your decision.”
“The wife of the chief doesn’t go into the field.”
“She’s going to be disappointed.”
“I’m used to it.”
“What about you, Uzi?”
“What about me?”
“I could use your help for the recruitment.”
“Why?”
“Because your grandparents lived in Vienna before the war, and you speak German like an Austrian goatherd.”
“It’s better than that dreadful Berlin accent of yours.”
Navot looked up at his video wall, where a family in the besieged city of Homs was preparing a meal of boiled weeds. It was the only thing left in the city to eat.
“There’s one other thing you need to think about,” he said. “If you make even the smallest mistake, Waleed al-Siddiqi is going to chop that girl to pieces and throw her into the Danube.”
“Actually,” replied Gabriel, “he’ll let the boys have a little fun with her first. Then he’ll kill her.”
Navot lowered his gaze from the screen and looked at Gabriel seriously. “You sure you want to go through with this?”
“Absolutely.”
“I was hoping that would be your answer.”
“What are we going to do about Bella?”
“Take her with you. Or better yet, send her straight to Damascus.” Navot looked at the video wall again and shook his head slowly. “This damn war would be over in a week.”
Later that evening, the Guardian of London published a report accusing the Syrian regime of utilizing torture and murder on an industrial scale. The report was based on a trove of photographs that had been smuggled out of Syria by the man whose job it had been to take them. They depicted the bodies of thousands of people, young men mainly, who had died while in the custody of their government. Some of the men had been shot. Some bore the marks of hanging or electrocution. Others had no eyes. Nearly all looked like human skeletons.
It was against this backdrop that the team carried out their final preparations. From Housekeeping they acquired two safe properties—a small apartment in the center of Linz and a large tawny-colored villa on the shore of the Attersee, twenty-five miles to the south. Transport saw to the cars and motorbikes; Identity, to the passports. Gabriel had several from which to choose, but in the end he settled on Jonathan Albright, an American who worked for something called Markham Capital Advisers of Greenwich, Connecticut. Albright was no ordinary financial consultant. He had recently smuggled a Russian spy from St. Petersburg to the West. And before that he inserted a shipment of sabotaged centrifuges into Iran’s nuclear supply chain.
When the preparations were complete, the team members left King Saul Boulevard and headed to their assigned “jump sites,” a constellation of safe flats in the Tel Aviv area where Office field operatives assumed their new identities before leaving Israel for their missions. As usual, they traveled to their destination at different times, and by different routes, so as not to arouse the suspicion of the local immigration authorities. Mordecai and Oded were the first to arrive in Austria; Dina Sarid, the last. Her passport identified her as Ingrid Roth, a native of Munich. She spent a single night at the villa on the Attersee. Then, at noon the following day, she took possession of the apartment in Linz. That evening, while standing in the window of the cramped sitting room, she saw an old Volvo rattle to a stop outside the building on the opposite side of the street. The woman who emerged from behind the wheel was Jihan Nawaz.
Dina snapped Jihan’s photograph and dispatched it securely to Room 465C, where Gabriel was working late, with no company other than Bella’s files on the massacre at Hama. He left King Saul Boulevard a few minutes after ten and, bypassing normal Office procedures, returned to his apartment in Narkiss Street to spend his last night in Israel with his wife. She was sleeping when he arrived; he slipped into bed quietly and placed his hand atop her abdomen. She stirred, gave him a drowsy kiss, and then drifted back to sleep. And in the morning, when she woke, he was gone.
35
MUNICH, GERMANY
THE MANY VERSIONS OF GABRIEL’S face were well known to the security services of Austria, so Travel thought it best to route him through Munich instead. He sailed easily through passport control as a smiling, moneyed American and then rode an airport coach to the long-term parking lot, where Transport had left an untraceable Audi A7. The key was hidden in a magnetic box in the left-rear wheel well. Gabriel removed it with a swipe of his hand and, crouching, searched the undercarriage for any evidence of a bomb. Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, he climbed behind the wheel and started the engine. The radio had been left on; a woman with a low, bored voice was reading a news bulletin on Deutschlandfunk. Unlike many of his countrymen, Gabriel did not recoil at the sound of German. It was the language he had heard in his mother’s womb, and even now it remained the language of his dreams. Chiara, when she spoke to him in his sleep, spoke in German.
He found the parking chit where Transport had said it would be—in the center console, tucked inside a brochure for Munich’s racier nightclubs—and drove with a foreigner’s caution toward the exit. The parking attendant examined the chit long enough to send the first operational charge of electricity down the length of Gabriel’s spine. Then the arm of the barricade rose, and he made his way to the entrance of the autobahn. As he drove through the Bavarian sunlight, memories assailed him at every turn. To his right, floating above the Munich skyline, was the space-age Olympic Tower, beneath which Black September had carried out the attack that launched Gabriel’s career. And an hour later, when he crossed into Austria, the first town he entered was Braunau am Inn, the birthplace of Hitler. He tried to keep thoughts of Vienna at bay, but it was beyond his powers of compartmentalization. He heard a car engine hesitate to turn over and saw a flash of fire rising over a graceful street. And he sat again at Leah’s hospital bed and told her that her child was dead. We should have stayed in Venice together, my love. Things would have turned out differently . . . Yes, he thought now. Things would be different. He would have a son of twenty-five. And he would never have fallen in love with a beautiful young girl from the ghetto named Chiara Zolli.
The house where Hitler was born stood at Salzburger Vorstadt 15, not far from Braunau’s main shopping square. Gabriel parked across the street and sat for a moment with the engine idling, wondering whether he had the strength to go through with it. Then, suddenly, he flung open the door and propelled himself across the street, as if to remove the option of turning back. Twenty-five years earlier, Braunau’s mayor had decided to place a stone of remembrance outside the house. It had been mined from the quarry at Mauthausen and was carved with an inscription that made no specific mention of the Jews or the Holocaust. Alone, Gabriel stood before it, thinking not of the murder of six million but of the war taking place two thousand miles to the southeast, in Syria. Despite all the books, the documentaries, the memorials, and the declarations regarding universal human rights, a dictator was once again killing his people with poison gas and turning them into human skeletons in camps and prisons. It was almost as if the lessons of the Holocaust had been forgotten. Or perhaps, thought Gabriel, they had never been learned in the first place.
A young German couple—their
distinct accents betrayed them as Bavarians—joined him at the stone and spoke of Hitler as though he were a minor tyrant from a distant empire. Dispirited, Gabriel returned to his car and set out across Upper Austria. Snow clung to the highest mountain peaks, but in the valleys, where the villages lay, the meadows burned with wildflowers. He entered Linz a few minutes after two o’clock and parked near the New Cathedral. Then he spent an hour surveying what would soon be the most bucolic battlefield in the Syrian civil war. It was festival season in Linz. A film festival had just ended; a jazz festival would soon begin. Pale Austrians sunned themselves on the green lawns of Danube Park. Overhead, a single cotton wool cloud scudded across the azure sky like a barrage balloon adrift from its moorings.
The last stop on Gabriel’s survey was the streetcar roundabout adjacent to Bank Weber AG. Parked outside the bank’s plain entrance, its engine throbbing at idle, was a black Mercedes Maybach limousine. Judging by the way the car was resting low on its wheels, it was heavily armored. Gabriel sat on a bench and allowed two trams to pass. Then, as a third was nearing the stop, he saw an elegantly dressed man emerge from the bank and duck quickly into the back of the car. His face was memorable for its hard cheekbones and unusually small, straight mouth. A few seconds later, the car shot past Gabriel’s shoulder in a black blur. The man was now holding a mobile phone tensely to his ear. Money never sleeps, thought Gabriel. Even blood money.
When a fourth tram slithered into the roundabout, Gabriel stepped on board and rode it to the other side of the Danube. He searched the undercarriage of the car a second time to make certain it had not been tampered with in his absence. Then he headed for the Attersee. The safe house was located on the western shore of the lake, near the town of Litzlberg. There was a wooden gate, and beyond the gate stretched a drive lined with pine and flowering vines. Several cars were parked in the forecourt, including an old Renault with Corsican registration plates. Its owner was standing in the open door of the villa, dressed casually in a pair of loose-fitting khaki trousers and a yellow cotton pullover. “I’m Peter Rutledge,” he said, extending his arm toward Gabriel with a smile. “Welcome to Shangri-La.”
They were supposed to be on holiday, thus the paperback novels lying open on the lounge chairs, and the badminton birdies scattered across the lawn, and the gleaming wooden motorboat, rented for the princely sum of twenty-five thousand a week, dozing at the end of the long dock. Inside the villa, however, it was all business. The walls of the dining room were hung with maps and surveillance photographs, and resting upon the formal table were several open notebook computers. On the screen of one was a static shot of a modern glass-and-steel mansion located in the hills above Linz. On another was the entrance of Bank Weber AG. At ten minutes past five, Herr Weber himself emerged from the doorway and climbed into a sensible BMW sedan. Two minutes later, there appeared a young girl who was so pale and pretty she looked scarcely real. And after the young girl came Jihan Nawaz. She hurried across the little square and stepped aboard a waiting streetcar. And though she did not realize it, the man with pockmarked skin seated across the aisle from her was an Israeli intelligence officer named Yaakov Rossman. Together they rode the tram to the Mozartstrasse, each staring into a private space, and then went their separate ways—Yaakov to the west, Jihan to the east. When she arrived at her apartment building, she saw Dina Sarid dismounting her shiny blue motor scooter on the opposite side of the street. The two women exchanged a fleeting smile. Then Jihan entered her building and climbed the stairs to her flat. Two minutes later, a message appeared on her Twitter feed, stating that she was thinking about running over to Bar Vanilli for a drink later that evening. There were no responses.
For the next three days, the two women floated through the tranquil streets of Linz along lines that did not meet. There was a near encounter on the promenade outside the Museum of Modern Art and a brief meeting of their eyes in the stalls of Alter Markt. But otherwise, fate seemed to conspire to keep them apart. They seemed destined to remain neighbors who did not speak, strangers who gazed at one another across a gulf that could not be bridged.
But unbeknownst to Jihan Nawaz, their eventual meeting was preordained. In fact, it was being actively plotted by a group of men and women operating from a beautiful villa along the shore of a lake twenty miles to the southwest. It was not a question of whether the two women would meet, only of when. All the team required was one more piece of evidence.
It arrived at dawn on the fourth day, when they overheard Hamid Khaddam, the London-based lawyer for LXR Investments, opening a pair of accounts at a dubious bank in the Cayman Islands. Afterward, he rang Waleed al-Siddiqi at his home in Linz and told him the accounts were now ready to receive funds. The money arrived twenty-four hours later, in a transaction that was monitored by the computer hackers of Unit 8200. The first account received $20 million in funds that flowed through Bank Weber AG. The second received $25 million.
Which left only the time, place, and circumstances of the meeting between the two women. The time would be half past five the following afternoon; the place would be the Pfarrplatz. Dina was seated outside at Café Meier, reading a tattered copy of The Remains of the Day, when Jihan walked past her table alone, a shopping bag dangling from her hand. She stopped suddenly, turned around, and walked over to the table.
“That’s such a coincidence,” she said in German.
“What’s that?” replied Dina in the same language.
“You’re reading my favorite book.”
“Whatever you do, don’t tell me how it ends.” Dina placed the novel on the table and held out her hand. “I’m Ingrid,” she said. “I believe I live across the street from you.”
“I believe you do. I’m Jihan.” She smiled. “Jihan Nawaz.”
36
LINZ, AUSTRIA
THEY WALKED TO A SMALL place not far from their apartments where they could get wine. Dina ordered an Austrian Riesling, knowing full well that, like The Remains of the Day, Riesling was Jihan’s favorite. The waiter filled their glasses and departed. Jihan raised hers and made a toast to a new friendship. Then she smiled awkwardly, as though she feared she had been presumptuous. She seemed eager, nervous.
“You haven’t been in Linz long,” she said.
“Ten days,” replied Dina.
“And where were you before?”
“I lived in Berlin.”
“Berlin is very different from Linz.”
“Very,” agreed Dina.
“So why did you come here?” Jihan gave another awkward smile. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t pry. It’s my worst fault.”
“Prying into other people’s affairs?”
“I’m hopelessly nosy,” she replied, nodding. “Feel free to tell me to mind my own business at any time.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.” Dina stared into her glass. “My husband and I were divorced recently. I decided I needed a change of pace, so I came here.”
“Why Linz?”
“My family and I used to spend summers in Upper Austria on a lake. I’ve always loved it here.”
“Which lake?”
“The Attersee.”
The long shadow of a church bell tower was stretching across the street toward their table. Yossi Gavish and Rimona Stern passed through it, laughing, as though sharing a private joke. The recently divorced Ingrid Roth seemed saddened by the sight of a happy couple. Jihan seemed annoyed.
“But you weren’t raised in Germany, were you, Ingrid?”
“Why do you ask?”
“You don’t sound like a native German speaker.”
“My father worked in New York,” Dina explained. “I grew up in Manhattan. When I was young, I refused to speak German at home. I thought it was totally uncool.”
If Jihan found the explanation suspicious, she gave no sign of it. “Are you working in Linz?” she asked.
“I suppose that depends on how you define working.”
“I define it as going to an office each
morning.”
“Then I’m definitely not working.”
“So why are you here?”
I’m here because of you, thought Dina. Then she explained that she had come to Linz to work on a novel.
“You’re a writer?”
“Not yet.”
“What’s your book about?”
“It’s a story of unrequited love.”
“Like Stevens and Miss Kenton?” Jihan nodded toward the novel that lay on the table between them.
“A little.”
“Is the story set here in Linz?”
“Vienna, actually,” replied Dina. “During the war.”
“World War Two?”
Dina nodded.
“Are your characters Jewish?”
“One is.”
“The boy or the girl?”
“The boy.”
“And you?”
“What about me?”
“Are you Jewish, Ingrid?”
“No, Jihan,” said Dina. “I’m not Jewish.”
Jihan’s face remained expressionless.
“And what about you?” asked Dina, changing the subject.
“I’m not Jewish, either,” answered Jihan with a smile.
“And you’re not from Austria.”
“I grew up in Hamburg.”
“And before that?”
“I was born in the Middle East.” She paused, then added, “In Syria.”
“Such a terrible war,” Dina said distantly.
“If it’s all right with you, Ingrid, I’d rather not discuss the war. It depresses me.”
“Then we shall pretend the war doesn’t exist.”
“At least for now.” Jihan drew a packet of cigarettes from her handbag; and when she lit one, Dina could see her hand was trembling slightly. The first inhalation of tobacco seemed to calm her.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what I’m doing in Linz?”
“What are you doing in Linz, Jihan?”
“A man from my country bought a stake in a small private bank here. He needed someone on his staff who spoke Arabic.”