In the evenings, they watched the news on German television. The election in neighboring Austria had captured the attention of German viewers. Metzler was rolling forward. The crowds at his campaign stops, like his lead in the polls, grew larger by the day. Austria, it seemed, was on the verge of doing the unthinkable, electing a chancellor from the far right. Inside the Munich safe flat, Gabriel and his team found themselves in the odd position of cheering Metzler’s ascent in the polls, for without Metzler, their doorway to Radek would close.
Invariably, soon after the news ended, Lev would check in from King Saul Boulevard and subject Gabriel to a tedious cross-examination of the day’s events. It was the one time Shamron was relieved not to bear the burden of operational command. Gabriel would pace the floor with a phone against his ear, patiently answering each of Lev’s questions. And sometimes, if the light was right, Shamron would see Gabriel’s mother, pacing beside him. She was the one member of the team that no one ever mentioned.
ONCE EACH DAY, usually in late afternoon, Gabriel and Shamron escaped the safe flat to walk in the English Gardens. Eichmann’s shadow hung over them. Gabriel reckoned he had been there from the beginning. He had come that night in Vienna, when Max Klein had told Gabriel the story of the SS officer who had murdered a dozen prisoners at Birkenau and now enjoyed coffee every afternoon at the Café Central. Still, Shamron had diligently avoided even speaking his name, until now.
Gabriel had heard the story of Eichmann’s capture many times before. Indeed, Shamron had used it in September 1972 to prod Gabriel into joining the Wrath of God team. The version Shamron told during those walks along the tree-lined footpaths of the English Gardens was more detailed than any Gabriel had heard before. Gabriel knew these were not merely the ramblings of an old man trying to relive past glories. Shamron was never one to trumpet his own successes, and the publishers would wait in vain for his memoirs. Gabriel knew Shamron was telling him about Eichmann for a reason. I’ve taken the journey you’re about to make, Shamron was saying. In another time, in another place, in the company of another man, but there are things you should know. Gabriel, at times, could not shake the sense that he was walking with history.
“Waiting for the escape plane was the hardest part. We were trapped in the safe house with this rat of a man. Some of the team couldn’t bear to look at him. I had to sit in his room night after night and keep watch over him. He was chained to the iron bed, dressed in pajamas with opaque goggles over his eyes. We were strictly forbidden to engage him in conversation. Only the interrogator was allowed to speak to him. I couldn’t obey those orders. You see, I had to know. How had this man who was sickened by the sight of blood killed six million of my people? My mother and father? My two sisters? I asked him why he had done it. And do you know what he said? He told me he did it because it was his job—his job, Gabriel—as if he were nothing more than a bank clerk or a railroad conductor.”
And later, standing at the balustrade of a humpbacked bridge overlooking a stream:
“Only once did I want to kill him, Gabriel—when he tried to tell me that he did not hate the Jewish people, that he actually liked and admired the Jewish people. To show me how much he cared for the Jews, he began to recite our words: Shema, Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad! I could not bear to hear those words coming out of that mouth, the mouth that had given the orders to murder six million. I clamped my hand over his face until he shut up. He began to shake and convulse. I thought I’d caused him to have a heart attack. He asked me if I was going to kill him. He pleaded with me not to harm his son. This man who had torn children from the arms of their parents and thrown them into the fire was concerned about his own child, as if we would act like him, as if we would murder children.”
And at a scarred wooden table, in a deserted beer garden:
“We wanted him to agree to return with us voluntarily to Israel. He, of course, did not want to go. He wanted to stand trial in Argentina or Germany. I told him this was not possible. One way or another, he was going to stand trial in Israel. I risked my career by allowing him to have a bit of red wine and a cigarette. I did not drink with the murderer. I could not. I assured him that he would be given a chance to tell his side of the story, that he would be given a proper trial with a proper defense. He was under no illusions about the outcome, but the notion of explaining himself to the world somehow appealed to him. I also pointed out the fact that he would have the dignity of knowing he was about to die, something he denied to the millions who marched into the disrobing rooms and the gas chambers while Max Klein serenaded them. He signed the paper, dated it like a good German bureaucrat, and it was done.”
Gabriel listened intently, his coat collar around his ears, his hands crammed into his pockets. Shamron shifted the focus from Adolf Eichmann to Erich Radek.
“You have an advantage because you’ve seen him face to face once already, at the Café Central. I’d seen Eichmann only from afar, while we were watching his house and planning the snatch, but I had never actually spoken to him or even stood next to him. I knew exactly how tall he was, but couldn’t picture it. I had a sense of how his voice would sound, but I didn’t really know. You know Radek, but unfortunately he knows a bit about you, too, thanks to Manfred Kruz. He’ll want to know more. He’ll feel exposed and vulnerable. He’ll try to level the playing field by asking you questions. He’ll want to know why you are pursuing him. Under no circumstances are you to engage him in anything like normal conversation. Remember, Erich Radek was no camp guard or gas chamber operator. He was SD, a skilled interrogator. He’ll try to bring those skills to bear one final time to avoid his fate. Don’t play into his hands. You’re the one in charge now. He’ll find the reversal a shock to the system.”
Gabriel cast his eyes downward, as if he were reading the words carved into the table.
“So why do Eichmann and Radek deserve the trappings of justice,” he said finally, “but the Palestinians from Black September only vengeance?”
“You would have made a fine Talmudic scholar, Gabriel.”
“And you’re avoiding my question.”
“Obviously, there was a measure of pure vengeance in our decision to target the Black September terrorists, but it was more than that. They posed a continuing threat. If we didn’t kill them, they would kill us. It was war.”
“Why not arrest them, put them on trial?”
“So they could spout their propaganda from an Israeli court?” Shamron shook his head slowly. “They already did that”—he raised his hand and pointed to the tower rising over the Olympic Park—“right here in this city, in front of all the world’s cameras. It wasn’t our job to give them another opportunity to justify the massacre of innocents.”
He lowered his hand and leaned across the table. It was then that he told Gabriel of the prime minister’s wishes. His breath froze before him as he spoke.
“I don’t want to kill an old man,” Gabriel said.
“He’s not an old man. He wears an old man’s clothing and hides behind an old man’s face, but he’s still Erich Radek, the monster who killed a dozen men at Auschwitz because they couldn’t identify a piece of Brahms. The monster who killed two girls by the side of a Polish road because they wouldn’t deny the atrocities of Birkenau. The monster who opened the graves of millions and subjected their corpses to one final humiliation. Infirmity does not forgive such sins.”
Gabriel looked up and held Shamron’s insistent gaze. “I know he’s a monster. I just don’t want to kill him. I want the world to know what this man did.”
“Then you’d better be ready to do battle with him.” Shamron glared at his wristwatch. “I’m bringing in someone to help you prepare. In fact, he should be arriving shortly.”
“Why am I being told about this now? I thought I was the one making all the operational decisions.”
“You are,” Shamron said. “But sometimes I have to show you the way. That’s what old men are for.”
NEITHER GABRIE
L NOR Shamron believed in harbingers or omens. If they had, the operation that brought Moshe Rivlin from Yad Vashem to the safe house in Munich would have cast doubt on the team’s ability to carry out the task before them.
Shamron wanted Rivlin approached quietly. Unfortunately, King Saul Boulevard entrusted the job to a pair of apprentices fresh from the Academy, both markedly Sephardic in appearance. They decided to contact Rivlin while he walked home from Yad Vashem to his apartment near the Yehuda Market. Rivlin, who had grown up in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn and was still vigilant when walking the streets, quickly noticed that he was being followed by two men in a car. He assumed them to be Hamas suicide bombers or a pair of street criminals. When the car pulled alongside him and the passenger asked for a word, Rivlin broke into a lopsided run. To everyone’s surprise, the tubby archivist proved himself to be an elusive prey, and he evaded his captors for several minutes before finally being cornered by the two Office agents in Ben Yehuda Street.
He arrived at the safe flat in Lehel late that evening, bearing two suitcases filled with research material and a chip on his shoulder over the way his summons had been handled. “How do you expect to snatch a man like Erich Radek if you can’t grab one fat archivist? Come on,” he said, pulling Gabriel into the privacy of the back bedroom. “We have a lot of ground to cover and not much time to do it.”
ON THE SEVENTH DAY, Adrian Carter came to Munich. It was a Wednesday; he arrived at the safe flat in the late afternoon, as the dusk was turning to dark. The passport in the pocket of his Burberry overcoat still said Brad Cantwell. Gabriel and Shamron were just returning from an outing in the English Gardens and were bundled in their hats and scarves. Gabriel had dispatched the rest of the team members to their final staging positions, so the safe flat was empty of Office personnel. Only Rivlin remained. He greeted the deputy director of the CIA with his shirttail out and his shoes off and called himself Yaacov. The archivist had adapted well to the discipline of the operation.
Gabriel made the tea. Carter unbuttoned his coat and led himself on a preoccupied tour of the flat. He spent a long time in front of the maps. Carter believed in maps. Maps never lied to you. Maps never told you what they thought you wanted to hear.
“I like what you’ve done with the place, Herr Heller.” Carter finally removed his overcoat. “Neocontemporary squalor. And the smell. I’m sure I know it. Carry-out from the Wienerwald down the block, if I’m not mistaken.”
Gabriel handed him a mug of tea with the string from the bag still dangling over the edge of the rim. “Why are you here, Adrian?”
“I thought I’d pop over to see if I could be of help.”
“Bullshit.”
Carter cleared a spot on the couch and sat down heavily, a salesman at the end of a long and fruitless road trip. “Truth be told, I’m here at the behest of my director. It seems he’s getting a serious case of preoperative jitters. He feels we’re out on a limb together and you boys are the ones holding the chainsaw. He wants the Agency to be brought into the picture.”
“Meaning?”
“He wants to know the game plan.”
“You know the game plan, Adrian. I told you the game plan in Virginia. It hasn’t changed.”
“I know the broad strokes of the plan,” Carter said. “Now I’d like to see the fine print.”
“What you’re saying is that your director wants to review the plan and sign off on it.”
“Something like that. He also wants me standing on the sidelines with Ari when it goes down.”
“And if we tell him to go to hell?”
“I’d say there’s a fifty-fifty chance someone will whisper a warning in Erich Radek’s ear, and you’ll lose him. Play ball with the director, Gabriel. It’s the only way you’ll get Radek.”
“We’re ready to move, Adrian. Now is not the time for helpful suggestions from the seventh floor.”
Shamron sat down next to Carter. “If your director had an ounce of brains, he’d stay as far away from this as possible.”
“I tried to explain that to him—not in those terms, mind you, but something close. He’d have none of it. He came from Wall Street, our director. He likes to think of himself as a hands-on, take-charge sort of fellow. Always knew what every division of the company was doing. Tries to run the Agency the same way. And as you know, he’s also a friend of the president. If you cross him, he’ll call the White House, and it’ll be over.”
Gabriel looked to Shamron, who gritted his teeth and nodded. Carter got his briefing. Shamron remained seated for a few minutes, but soon he was up and pacing the room, a chef whose secret recipes are being given to a competitor up the street. When it was finished, Carter took a long time loading the bowl of his pipe with tobacco.
“Sounds to me as if you gentlemen are ready,” he said. “What are you waiting for? If I were you, I’d put it in motion before my hands-on director decides he wants to be part of the snatch team.”
Gabriel agreed. He picked up the telephone and dialed Uzi Navot in Zurich.
33
VIENNA • MUNICH
K LAUS HALDER KNOCKED softly on the door of the study. The voice on the other side granted permission for him to enter. He pushed open the door and saw the old man seated in the half-light, his eyes fixed on the flickering screen of the television: a Metzler rally that afternoon in Graz, adoring crowds, talk already turning to the composition of the Metzler cabinet. The old man killed the image by remote and turned his blue eyes on the bodyguard. Halder glanced toward the telephone. A green light was winking.
“Who is it?”
“Herr Becker, calling from Zurich.”
The old man picked up the receiver. “Good evening, Konrad.”
“Good evening, Herr Vogel. I’m sorry to bother you so late, but I’m afraid it couldn’t wait.”
“Is something wrong?”
“Oh, no, quite the contrary. Given the recent election news from Vienna, I’ve decided to quicken the pace of my preparations and proceed as though Peter Metzler’s victory is a fait accompli.”
“A wise course of action, Konrad.”
“I thought you’d agree. I have several documents that require your signature. I thought it would be best for us to start that process now rather than waiting until the last moment.”
“What sort of documents?”
“My lawyer will be able to explain them better than I can. If it’s all right with you, I’d like to come to Vienna for a meeting. It won’t take more than a few minutes.”
“How does Friday sound?”
“Friday would be fine, as long as it’s late afternoon. I have an appointment in the morning that can’t be moved.”
“Shall we say four o’clock?”
“Five would be better for me, Herr Vogel.”
“All right, Friday at five o’clock.”
“I’ll see you then.”
“Konrad?”
“Yes, Herr Vogel.”
“This lawyer—tell me his name, please.”
“Oskar Lange, Herr Vogel. He’s a very talented man. I’ve used him many times in the past.”
“I assume he’s a fellow who understands the meaning of the word ‘discretion’?”
“Discreet doesn’t even begin to describe him. You’re in very capable hands.”
“Goodbye, Konrad.”
The old man hung up the phone and looked at Halder.
“He’s bringing someone with him?”
A slow nod.
“He’s always come alone in the past. Why is he suddenly bringing along a helper?”
“Herr Becker is about to receive one hundred million dollars, Klaus. If there’s one man in the world we can trust, it’s the gnome from Zurich.”
The bodyguard moved toward the door.
“Klaus?”
“Yes, Herr Vogel?”
“Perhaps you’re right. Call some of our friends in Zurich. See if anyone’s heard of a lawyer named Oskar Lange.”
ON
E HOUR LATER, a recording of Becker’s telephone call was sent by secure transmission from the offices of Becker & Puhl in Zurich to the safe flat in Munich. They listened to it once, then again, then a third time. Adrian Carter did not like what he heard.
“You realize that as soon as Radek put down the phone, he made a second phone call to Zurich to check out Oskar Lange. I hope you’ve accounted for that.”
Shamron seemed disappointed in Carter. “What do you think, Adrian? We’ve never done this sort of thing before? We’re children who need to be shown the way?”
Carter put a match to his pipe and puffed smoke, awaiting his answer.
“Have you ever heard of the term sayan?” Shamron said. “Or sayanim?”
Carter nodded with the pipe between his teeth. “Your little volunteer helpers,” he said. “The hotel clerks who give you rooms without checking in. The rental car agents who give you cars that can’t be traced. The doctors who treat your agents when they have wounds that might raise difficult questions. The bankers who give you emergency loans.”
Shamron nodded. “We’re a small intelligence service, twelve hundred full-time employees, that’s all. We couldn’t do what we do without the help of the sayanim. They’re one of the few benefits of the Diaspora, my private army of little volunteer helpers.”
“And Oskar Lange?”
“He’s a Zurich tax and estate lawyer. He also happens to be Jewish. It’s something that he doesn’t advertise in Zurich. A few years ago, I took Oskar to dinner in a quiet little restaurant on the lake and added him to my list of helpers. Last week, I asked him for a favor. I wanted to borrow his passport and his office, and I wanted him to disappear for a couple of weeks. When I told him why, he was all too willing to help. In fact, he wanted to go to Vienna himself and help capture Radek.”