Daniel Silva's Gabriel Allon Series

by Daniel Silva

  “Are you armed?”

  Gabriel shook his head wearily.

  “Do you mind if I put my mind at ease?” Kruz asked. “You do have something of a reputation.”

  Gabriel raised his hands above his shoulders. The officer who’d been behind him in the hall entered the room and conducted the search. It was professional and very thorough, starting with the neck and ending with the ankles. Kruz seemed disappointed by the results.

  “Remove your coat and empty your pockets.”

  Gabriel hesitated and was spurred on with a painful jab to the kidney. He unzipped his coat and handed it to Kruz, who searched the pockets and felt the lining for a false compartment.

  “Turn out the pockets of your trousers.”

  Gabriel complied. The result was a few coins and the stub of a streetcar ticket. Kruz looked at the two officers holding the mattress and ordered them to reassemble the bed. “Mr. Allon is a professional,” he said. “We’re not going to find anything.”

  The officers plopped the mattress back onto the box spring. Kruz, with a wave of his hand, told them to leave the room. He sat down again at the desk and pointed toward the bed.

  “Make yourself comfortable.”

  Gabriel remained standing.

  “How long have you been in Vienna?”

  “You tell me.”

  Kruz acknowledged the professional compliment with a terse smile. “You arrived on a flight from Ben-Gurion Airport the night before last. After checking into this hotel, you proceeded to Vienna General Hospital, where you spent several hours with your friend Eli Lavon.”

  Kruz fell silent. Gabriel wondered how much else Kruz knew about his activities in Vienna. Did he know about the meetings with Max Klein and Renate Hoffmann? His encounter with Ludwig Vogel at the Café Central and his excursion to Salzkammergut? Kruz, if he did know more, was unlikely to say. He was not the kind to tip his hand for no reason. Gabriel imagined him a cold and emotionless gambler.

  “Why didn’t you arrest me earlier?”

  “I haven’t arrested you now.” Kruz lit a cigarette. “We were prepared to overlook your violation of our agreement because we assumed you’d come to Vienna to be at the side of your injured friend. But it quickly became apparent that you intended to conduct a private investigation of the bombing. For obvious reasons, I cannot allow that.”

  “Yes,” Gabriel agreed, “for obvious reasons.”

  Kruz spent a moment contemplating the smoke rising from the ember of his cigarette. “We had an agreement, Mr. Allon. Under no circumstances were you to return to this country. You’re not welcome here. You’re not supposed to be here. I don’t care if you’re upset about your friend Eli Lavon. This is our investigation, and we don’t need any help from you or your service.”

  Kruz looked at his watch. “There’s an El Al flight leaving in three hours. You’re going to be on it. I’ll keep you company while you pack your bags.”

  Gabriel looked around at his clothing strewn across the floor. He lifted the lid of his suitcase and saw that the lining had been cut away. Kruz shrugged his shoulders—What did you expect? Gabriel bent down and started picking up his belongings. Kruz looked out the French doors and smoked.

  After a moment, Kruz asked, “Is she still alive?”

  Gabriel turned slowly around and fixed his gaze on Kruz’s small, dark eyes. “Are you referring to my wife?”

  “Yes.”

  Gabriel shook his head slowly. “Don’t speak about my wife, Kruz.”

  Kruz smiled humorlessly. “You’re not going to start making threats again, are you, Allon? I might be tempted to take you into custody for a more thorough questioning about your activities here.”

  Gabriel said nothing.

  Kruz crushed out his cigarette. “Pack your bags, Allon. You don’t want to miss your plane.”

  PART TWO

  The Hall of Names

  12

  JERUSALEM

  THE LIGHTS OF Ben-Gurion Airport pricked the darkness of the Coastal Plain. Gabriel leaned his head against the window and watched the runway rising slowly to meet him. The tarmac shone like glass in the night rain. As the plane slowed to a stop, Gabriel spotted the man from King Saul Boulevard, sheltering beneath an umbrella at the foot of the stairs. He made certain he was the last passenger to leave the plane.

  They entered the terminal through a special doorway used by senior government officials and visiting dignitaries. The man from headquarters was a disciple of Lev, corporate and high-tech, with a boardroom bearing and a belief that men of the field were simply blunt objects to be manipulated by higher beings. Gabriel walked one step ahead of him.

  “The boss wants to see you.”

  “I’m sure he does, but I haven’t slept in two days, and I’m tired.”

  “The boss doesn’t care if you’re tired. Who the hell do you think you are, Allon?”

  Gabriel, even in the sanctuary of Ben-Gurion Airport, did not appreciate the use of his real name. He wheeled around. The headquarters man held up his palms in surrender. Gabriel turned and kept walking. The headquarters man had the good sense not to follow.

  Outside, rain was hammering against the pavement. Lev’s doing, no doubt. Gabriel sought shelter beneath the taxi stand and thought about where to go. He had no residence in Israel; the Office was his only home. Usually he stayed at a safe flat or Shamron’s villa in Tiberias.

  A black Peugeot turned into the traffic circle. The weight of the armor made it ride low on the heavy-duty suspension. It stopped in front of Gabriel, the bulletproof rear window slid down. Gabriel smelled the bitter, familiar scent of Turkish tobacco. Then he saw the hand, liver-spotted and blue-veined, gesturing wearily for him to come out of the rain.

  THE CAR LURCHED forward even before Gabriel could close the door. Shamron was never one for standing still. He crushed out his cigarette for Gabriel’s sake and lowered the windows for a few seconds in order to clear the air. When the windows were closed again, Gabriel told him of Lev’s hostile reception. He spoke to Shamron in English at first; then, remembering where he was, he switched to Hebrew.

  “Apparently, he wants to have a word with me.”

  “Yes, I know,” Shamron said. “He’d like to see me as well.”

  “How did he find out about Vienna?”

  “It seems Manfred Kruz paid a courtesy call on the embassy after your deportation and threw something of a fit. I’m told it wasn’t pretty. The Foreign Ministry is furious, and the entire top floor of King Saul Boulevard is baying for my blood—and yours.”

  “What can they do to me?”

  “Nothing, which is why you’re my perfect accomplice—that and your obvious talents, of course.”

  The car sped out of the airport and turned onto the highway. Gabriel wondered why they were heading toward Jerusalem, but was too exhausted to care. After a while, they began to climb into the Judean Mountains. Soon the car was filled with the scent of eucalyptus and wet pine. Gabriel looked out the rain-spattered window and tried to remember the last time he had set foot in his country. It was after he had hunted down Tariq al-Hourani. He’d spent a month in a safe flat just outside the walls of the Old City, recovering from a bullet wound in his chest. That was more than three years ago. He realized that the threads that bound him to this place were fraying. He wondered whether he, like Francesco Tiepolo, would die in Venice and suffer the indignity of a mainland burial.

  “Something tells me Lev and the Foreign Ministry are going to be slightly less annoyed with me when they find out what’s inside this.” Shamron held up an envelope. “Looks like you were a very busy boy during your brief stay in Vienna. Who’s Ludwig Vogel?”

  Gabriel, his head propped against the window, told Shamron everything, beginning with his encounter with Max Klein, and ending with his tense confrontation with Manfred Kruz in his hotel room. Shamron was soon smoking again, and though Gabriel could not see his face clearly in the back of the darkened limousine, the old man was actually s
miling. Umberto Conti may have given Gabriel the tools to become a great restorer, but Shamron was responsible for his flawless memory.

  “No wonder Kruz was so anxious to get you out of Austria,” Shamron said. “The Islamic Fighting Cells?” He emitted a burst of derisive laughter. “How convenient. The government accepts the claim of responsibility and sweeps the affair under the rug as an act of Islamic terror on Austrian soil. That way the trail doesn’t get too close to Austrians—or to Vogel and Metzler, especially so near to the election.”

  “But what about the documents from the Staatsarchiv? According to them, Ludwig Vogel is squeaky clean.”

  “So why did he plant a bomb in Eli’s office and murder Max Klein?”

  “We don’t know if he did either one of those things.”

  “True, but the facts certainly suggest that’s a possibility. We might not be able to prove it in court, but the story would sell a lot of newspapers.”

  “You’re suggesting a leak?”

  “Why don’t we light a fire under Vogel and see how he reacts?”

  “Bad idea,” Gabriel said. “Remember Waldheim and the revelations about his Nazi past? They were dismissed as foreign agitation and outside interference in Austrian affairs. Ordinary Austrians closed ranks around him, as did the Austrian authorities. The affair also raised the level of anti-Semitism inside the country. A leak, Ari, would be a very bad idea.”

  “So what do you suggest we do?”

  “Max Klein was convinced that Ludwig Vogel was an SS man who committed an atrocity at Auschwitz. According to the documents in the Staatsarchiv, Ludwig Vogel was too young to be that man—and he was in the Wehrmacht, not the SS. But assume for argument’s sake that Max Klein was right.”

  “That would mean that Ludwig Vogel is someone else.”

  “Exactly,” Gabriel said. “So let’s find out who he really is.”

  “How do you intend to do that?”

  “I’m not sure,” Gabriel said, “but the things in that envelope, in proper hands, might yield some valuable clues.”

  Shamron nodded thoughtfully. “There’s a man at Yad Vashem who you should see. He’ll be able to help you. I’ll set up an appointment first thing in the morning.”

  “There’s one more thing, Ari. We need to get Eli out of Vienna.”

  “My thoughts exactly.” Shamron removed the telephone from the console and pressed a Speed-dial button. “This is Shamron. I need to speak to the prime minister.”

  YAD VASHEM, LOCATED atop Mount Herzel in the western portion of Jerusalem, is Israel’s official memorial to the six million who perished in the Shoah. It is also the world’s foremost center for Holocaust research and documentation. The library contains more than one hundred thousand volumes, the largest and most complete collection of Holocaust literature in the world. Stored in the archives are more than fifty-eight million pages of original documents, including thousands of personal testimonies, written, dictated, or videotaped by survivors of the Shoah in Israel and around the world.

  Moshe Rivlin was expecting him. A rotund, bearded academic, he spoke Hebrew with a pronounced Brooklyn accent. His special area of expertise resided not with the victims of the Shoah but with its perpetrators—the Germans who served the Nazi death machine and the thousands of non-German helpers who willingly and enthusiastically took part in the destruction of Europe’s Jews. He served as a paid consultant for the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, compiling documentary evidence against accused Nazi war criminals and scouring Israel for living witnesses. When he was not searching the archives of Yad Vashem, Rivlin could usually be found among the survivors, looking for someone who remembered.

  Rivlin led Gabriel inside the archives building and into the main reading room. It was a surprisingly cramped space, brightly lit by large floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the hills of west Jerusalem. A pair of scholars sat hunched over open books; another stared transfixed into the screen of a micro film reader. When Gabriel suggested something a bit more private, Rivlin led him into a small side room and closed the thick glass door. The version of events Gabriel provided was well sanitized, but thorough enough so that nothing important was lost in translation. He showed Rivlin all the material he had gathered in Austria: the Staatsarchiv file, the photograph, the wristwatch, and the ring. When Gabriel pointed out the inscription on the inside of the band, Rivlin read it and looked up sharply.

  “Amazing,” he whispered.

  “What does it mean?”

  “I have to gather some documents from the archives.” Rivlin stood. “It’s going to take a little time.”

  “How long?”

  The archivist shrugged. “An hour, maybe a little less. Have you ever been to the memorials?”

  “Not since I was a schoolboy.”

  “Take a walk.” Rivlin patted Gabriel’s shoulder. “Come back in an hour.”

  GABRIEL WALKED ALONG a pine-shaded footpath and descended the stone passage into the darkness of Children’s Memorial. Five candles, reflected infinitely by mirrors, created the illusion of a galaxy of stars, while a recorded voice read the names of the dead.

  He emerged back into the brilliant sunlight and walked to the Hall of Remembrance, where he stood motionless before the eternal flame, flickering amid black basalt engraved with some of history’s most infamous names: Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, Bergen-Belsen, Chelmo, Auschwitz….

  In the Hall of Names, there were no flames or statues, just countless file folders filled with Pages of Testimony, each bearing the story of a martyr: name, place and date of birth, name of parents, place of residence, profession, place of death. A gentle woman named Shoshanna searched the computer database and located the Pages of Testimony for Gabriel’s grandparents, Viktor and Sarah Frankel. She printed them out and handed them sadly over to Gabriel. At the bottom of each page was the name of the person who had supplied the information: Irene Allon, Gabriel’s mother.

  He paid a small surcharge for the printouts, two shekels for each, and walked next door to the Yad Vashem Art Museum, home of the largest collection of Holocaust art in the world. As he roamed the galleries, he found it nearly impossible to fathom the undying human spirit that managed to produce art under conditions of starvation, slavery, and unimaginable brutality. Suddenly, his own work seemed trivial and utterly without meaning. What did dead saints in a museum of a church have to do with anything? Mario Delvecchio, arrogant, egotistical Mario Delvecchio, seemed entirely irrelevant.

  In the final room was a special exhibit of children’s art. One image seized him like a choke hold, a charcoal sketch of an androgynous child, cowering before the gigantic figure of an SS officer.

  He glanced at his watch. An hour had passed. He left the art museum and hurried back to the archives to hear the results of Moshe Rivlin’s search.

  HE FOUND RIVLIN pacing anxiously in the sand stone forecourt of the archives building. Rivlin seized Gabriel by the arm and led him inside to the small room where they had met an hour before. Two thick files awaited them. Rivlin opened the first and handed Gabriel a photograph: Ludwig Vogel, in the uniform of an SS Sturmbannführer.

  “It’s Radek,” Rivlin whispered, unable to contain his excitement. “I think you may have actually found Erich Radek!”

  13

  VIENNA

  HERR KONRAD BECKER, of Becker & Puhl, Talstrasse 26, Zurich, arrived in Vienna that same morning. He cleared passport control with no delay and made his way to the arrivals hall, where he located the uniformed driver clutching a cardboard sign that read HERR BAUER. The client insisted on the added precaution. Becker did not like the client—nor was he under any illusions about the source of the account—but such was the nature of private Swiss banking, and Herr Konrad Becker was a true believer. If capitalism were a religion, Becker would be a leader of an extremist sect. In Becker’s learned opinion, man possessed the divine right to make money unfettered by government regulation and to conceal it wherever and however he pl
eased. Avoidance of taxation was not a choice but a moral duty. Inside the secretive world of Zurich banking, he was known for absolute discretion. It was the reason Konrad Becker had been entrusted with the account in the first place.

  Twenty minutes later, the car drew to a stop in front of a graystone mansion in the First District. On Becker’s instructions, the driver tapped the horn twice and, after a brief delay, the metal gate swung slowly open. As the car pulled into the drive, a man stepped out of the front entrance and descended the short flight of steps. He was in his late forties, with the build and swagger of a downhill racer. His name was Klaus Halder.

  Halder opened the car door and led Becker into the entrance hall. As usual, he asked the banker to open his briefcase for inspection. Then it was the rather degrading Leonardo pose, arms and legs spread wide, for a thorough going over with a handheld magnetometer.

  Finally he was escorted into the drawing room, a formal Viennese parlor, large and rectangular, with walls of rich yellow, and crown molding painted the color of clotted cream. The furniture was Baroque and covered in rich brocade. An ormolu clock ticked softly on the mantel. Each piece of furniture, each lamp and decorative object, seemed to complement its neighbor and the room as a whole. It was the room of a man who clearly possessed money and taste in equal amounts.

  Herr Vogel, the client, was seated beneath a portrait that appeared, in the opinion of Herr Becker, to have been painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder. He rose slowly and extended his hand. They were a mismatched pair: Vogel, tall and Germanic, with his bright blue eyes and white hair; Becker, short and bald with a cosmopolitan assurance born of the varied nature of his clientele. Vogel released the banker’s hand and gestured toward an empty chair. Becker sat down and produced a leather-bound ledger from his attaché case. The client nodded gravely. He was never one for small talk.