by Daniel Silva
The Clockmaker glanced at his watch. Mondiani took the hint and moved things along. On a steno pad, with a chewed pencil, he prepared the invoice.
“The weapon is clean and untraceable,” he said, the pencil scratching across the paper. “I suggest you drop it into the Tiber when you’re finished. The Polizia di Stato will never find it there.”
“And the motorbike?”
“Stolen,” said Mondiani. “Leave it in a public place with the keys in the ignition—a busy piazza, for example. I’m sure that within a few minutes, it will find a new home.”
Mondiani circled the final figure and turned the pad around so the Clockmaker could see. It was in euros, thank God. The Clockmaker, despite the fact he was a businessman himself, had always loathed making transactions in lire.
“Rather steep, is it not, Signor Mondiani?”
Mondiani shrugged and treated the Clockmaker to another hideous smile. The Clockmaker picked up the silencer and screwed it carefully into the end of the barrel. “This charge here,” the Clockmaker said, tapping the steno pad with the forefinger of his free hand. “What is that for?”
“That is my brokerage fee.” Mondiani managed to say this with a completely straight face.
“You’ve charged me three times as much for the Glock as I would pay in Austria. That, Signor Mondiani, is your brokerage fee.”
Mondiani folded his arms defiantly. “It is the Italian way. Do you want your weapon or not?”
“Yes,” said the Clockmaker, “but at a reasonable price.”
“I’m afraid that’s the going rate in Rome at the moment.”
“For an Italian, or just for foreigners?”
“It might be better if you took your business elsewhere.” Mondiani held out his hand. It was trembling. “Give me the gun, please, and see yourself out.”
The Clockmaker sighed. Perhaps it was better this way. Signor Mondiani, despite the assurances of the man from Vienna, was hardly the type to inspire trust. The Clockmaker, in a swift movement, rammed a cartridge into the Glock and chambered the first round. Signor Mondiani’s hands came up defensively. The shots pierced his palms before striking his face. The Clockmaker, as he slipped out of the office, realized that Mondiani had been honest about at least one thing. The gun, when fired, emitted little more than a whisper.
HE LET HIMSELF out of the shop and locked the door behind him. It was nearly dark now; the dome of the Basilica had receded into the blackening sky. He inserted the key into the ignition of the motorbike and started the engine. A moment later he was speeding down the Via della Conciliazione toward the mud-colored walls of the Castel San Angelo. He sped across the Tiber, then made his way through the narrow streets of Centro Storico, until he came to the Via Giulia.
He parked outside the Cardinal Hotel, removed his helmet, and went into the lobby, then turned to the right and entered a small, catacomblike bar with walls fashioned of ancient Roman granite. He ordered a Coke from the bartender—he was confident he could accomplish this feat without betraying his Austrian-German accent—and carried the drink to a small table adjacent to the passageway between the lobby and the bar. To pass the time, he snacked on pistachio nuts and leafed through a stack of Italian newspapers.
At seven-thirty a man stepped out of the elevator: short dark hair, gray at the temples, very green eyes. He left his room key at the front desk and went into the street.
The Clockmaker finished his Coke, then went outside. He swung his leg over Signor Mondiani’s motorino and started the engine. The black helmet was hanging by its strap from the handlebars. The Clockmaker removed the red helmet from the rear storage compartment and put it on, then placed the black one into the compartment and closed the lid.
He looked up and watched the figure of the green-eyed man retreating steadily into the darkness of the Via Giulia. Then he pulled back on the throttle and eased slowly after him.
22
ROME
THE RESERVATION AT La Carbonara was for four. Gabriel walked to the Piazza Farnese and found Pazner waiting near the French Embassy. They walked to Al Pompière and took a quiet table in the back. Pazner ordered red wine and polenta and handed Gabriel a plain envelope.
“It took some time,” Pazner said, “but eventually they found a reference to Krebs in a report about a Nazi named Aloïs Brunner. Know much about Brunner?”
He was a top aide to Eichmann, Gabriel replied, a deportation expert, highly skilled in the art of herding Jews into ghettos and then to the gas chambers. He’d worked with Eichmann on the deportation of the Austrian Jews. Later in the war, he handled deportations in Salonika and Vichy France.
Pazner, clearly impressed, impaled a piece of polenta. “And after the war he escaped to Syria, where he lived under the name George Fischer and served as a consultant to the regime. For all intents and purposes, the modern Syrian intelligence and security services were built by Aloïs Brunner.”
“Was Krebs working for him?”
“So it would seem. Open the envelope. And, by the way, be sure you treat that report with the respect it deserves. The man who filed it paid a very high price. Take a look at the agent’s code name.”
“MENASHE” WAS THE code name of a legendary Israeli spy named Eli Cohen. Born in Egypt in 1924, Cohen had emigrated to Israel in 1957 and immediately volunteered to work for Israeli intelligence. His psychological testing produced mixed results. The profilers found him highly intelligent and blessed with an extraordinary memory for detail. But they also discovered a dangerous streak of “exaggerated self-importance” and predicted Cohen would take unnecessary risks in the field.
Cohen’s file gathered dust until 1960, when increasing tension along the Syrian border led the men of Israeli intelligence to decide they desperately needed a spy in Damascus. A long search of candidates produced no suitable prospects. Then the search was broadened to include those who had been rejected for other reasons. Cohen’s file was opened once more, and before long, he found himself being prepared for an assignment that would ultimately end in his death.
After six months of intensive training, Cohen, posing as Kamal Amin Thabit, was sent to Argentina to construct his cover story: a successful Syrian businessman who had lived abroad his entire life and wanted only to move to his homeland. He ingratiated himself with the large Syrian expatriate community of Buenos Aires and developed many important friendships, including one with Major Amin al-Hafez, who would one day become the president of Syria.
In January 1962, Cohen moved to Damascus and opened an import-export business. Armed with introductions from the Syrian community in Buenos Aires, he quickly became a popular figure on the Damascus social and political scene, developing friendships with high-level members of the military and the ruling Ba’ath party. Syrian army officers took Cohen on tours of military facilities and even showed him the fortifications on the strategic Golan Heights. When Major al-Hafez became president, there was speculation that “Kamal Amin Thabit” might be in line for a cabinet post, perhaps even the Ministry of Defense.
Syrian intelligence had no idea that the affable Thabit was in reality an Israeli spy who was sending a steady stream of reports to his masters across the border. Urgent reports were sent via coded Morse radio transmissions. Longer and more detailed reports were written in invisible ink, hidden in crates of damascene furniture, and shipped to an Israeli front in Europe. Intelligence provided by Cohen gave Israeli military planners a remarkable window on the political and military situation in Damascus.
In the end, the warnings about Cohen’s penchant for risk proved correct. He grew reckless in his use of the radio, transmitting at the same time each morning or sending multiple transmissions in a single day. He sent greetings to his family and bemoaned Israel’s defeat in an international football match. The Syrian security forces, armed with the latest Soviet-made radio detection gear, started looking for the Israeli spy in Damascus. They found him on January 18, 1965, bursting into his apartment while he was sending a mes
sage to his controllers in Israel. Cohen’s hanging, in May 1965, was broadcast live on Syrian television.
Gabriel read the first report by the light of a flickering table candle. It had been sent through the European channel in May 1963. Contained within a detailed report on internal Ba’ath party politics and intrigue was a paragraph devoted to Aloïs Brunner:
I met “Herr Fischer” at a cocktail party hosted by a senior figure in the Ba’ath party. Herr Fischer was not looking particularly well, having recently lost several fingers on one hand to a letter bomb in Cairo. He blamed the attempt on his life on vengeful Jewish filth in Tel Aviv. He claimed that the work he was doing in Egypt would more than settle his account with the Israeli agents who had tried to murder him. Herr Fischer was accompanied that evening by a man called Otto Krebs. I had never seen Krebs before. He was tall and blue-eyed, very Germanic in appearance, unlike Brunner. He drank whiskey heavily and seemed a vulnerable sort, a man who might be blackmailed or turned by some other method.
“That’s it?” Gabriel asked. “One sighting at a cocktail party?”
“Apparently so, but don’t be discouraged. Cohen gave you one more clue. Look at the next report.”
Gabriel looked down and read it.
I saw “Herr Fischer” last week at a reception at the Ministry of Defense. I asked him about his friend, Herr Krebs. I told him that Krebs and I had discussed a business venture and I was disappointed that I had not heard back from him. Fischer said that was not surprising, since Krebs had recently moved to Argentina.
Pazner poured Gabriel a glass of wine. “I hear Buenos Aires is lovely this time of year.”
GABRIEL AND PAZNER separated in the Piazza Farnese; then Gabriel walked alone on the Via Giulia toward his hotel. The night had turned colder, and it was very dark in the street. The deep silence, combined with the rough paving stones beneath his feet, made it possible for him to imagine Rome as it had been a century and a half earlier, when the men of the Vatican still ruled supreme. He thought of Erich Radek, walking this very street, waiting for his passport and his ticket to freedom.
But was it really Radek who had come to Rome?
According to Bishop Hudal’s files, Radek had come to the Anima in 1948 and had left soon after as Otto Krebs. Eli Cohen had placed “Krebs” in Damascus as late as 1963. Then Krebs reportedly moved on to Argentina. The facts had exposed a glaring and perhaps irreconcilable contradiction in the case against Ludwig Vogel. According to the documents in the Staatsarchiv, Vogel was living in Austria by 1946, working for the American occupation authority. If that were true, then Vogel and Radek couldn’t possibly be the same man. How then to explain Max Klein’s belief that he had seen Vogel at Birkenau? The ring Gabriel had taken from Vogel’s chalet in Upper Austria? 1005, well done, Heinrich… The wristwatch? To Erich, in adoration, Monica… Had another man come to Rome in 1948 posing as Erich Radek? And if so, why?
Many questions, thought Gabriel, and only one possible trail to follow: Fischer said that was not surprising, since Krebs had recently moved to Argentina. Pazner was right. Gabriel had no choice but to continue the search in Argentina.
The heavy silence was shattered by the insectlike buzz of a motorino. Gabriel glanced over his shoulder as the bike rounded a corner and turned into the Via Giulia. Then it accelerated suddenly and sped directly toward him. Gabriel stopped walking and removed his hands from his coat pockets. He had a decision to make. Stand his ground like a normal Roman or turn and run? The decision was made for him, a few seconds later, when the helmeted rider reached into the front of his jacket and drew a silenced pistol.
GABRIEL LUNGED INTO a narrow street as the gun spit three tongues of fire. Three rounds struck the cornerstones of a building. Gabriel lowered his head and started to run.
The motorino was traveling too fast to make the turn. It skidded past the entrance of the street, then wobbled around in an awkward circle, allowing Gabriel a few critical seconds to put some distance between himself and his attacker. He turned right, onto a street that ran parallel to the Via Giulia, then made a sudden left. His plan was to head for the Corso Vittorio Emanuale II, one of Rome’s largest thoroughfares. There would be traffic on the street and pedestrians on the pavements. On the Corso he could find a place to conceal himself.
The whine of the motorino grew louder. Gabriel glanced over his shoulder. The bike was still following him and closing the distance at an alarming rate. He threw himself into a headlong sprint, hands clawing at the air, breath harsh and ragged. The headlamp fell upon him. He saw his own shadow on the paving stones in front of him, a flailing madman.
A second bike entered the street directly in front of him and skidded to a halt. The helmeted rider drew a weapon. So this is how it would be—a trap, two killers, no hope of escape. He felt like a target in a shooting gallery, waiting to be toppled.
He kept running, into the light. His arms rose, and he glimpsed his own hands, contorted and taut, the hands of a tormented figure in an Expressionist painting. He realized he was shouting. The sound echoed from the stucco and brickwork of the surrounding buildings and vibrated within his own ears, so that he could no longer hear the sound of the motorbike at his back. An image flashed before his eyes: his mother at the side of a Polish road with Erich Radek’s gun to her temple. Only then did he realize he was screaming in German. The language of his dreams. The language of his nightmares.
The second assassin leveled the weapon, then lifted the visor of the helmet.
Gabriel could hear the sound of his own name.
“Get down! Get down! Gabriel!”
He realized it was the voice of Chiara.
He threw himself to the street.
Chiara’s shots sailed overhead and struck the oncoming motorino. The bike veered out of control and slammed into the side of a building. The assassin catapulted over the handlebars and tumbled along the paving stones. The gun came to rest a few feet from Gabriel. He reached for it.
“No, Gabriel! Leave it! Hurry!”
He looked up and saw Chiara holding out her hand to him. He climbed on the back of the motorino and clung childlike to her hips as the bike roared up the Corso toward the river.
SHAMRON HAD A rule about safe flats: There was to be no physical contact between male and female agents. That evening, in an Office flat in the north of Rome, near a lazy bend in the Tiber, Gabriel and Chiara violated Shamron’s rule with an intensity born of the fear of death. Only afterward did Gabriel bother to ask Chiara how she had found him.
“Shamron told me you were coming to Rome. He asked me to watch your back. I agreed, of course. I have a very personal interest in your continued survival.”
Gabriel wondered how he had failed to notice he was being tailed by a five-foot-ten-inch Italian goddess, but then, Chiara Zolli was very good at her work.
“I wanted to join you for lunch at Piperno,” she said mischievously. “I didn’t think it was a terribly good idea.”
“How much do you know about the case?”
“Only that my worst fears about Vienna turned out to be true. Why don’t you tell me the rest?”
Which he did, beginning with his flight from Vienna and concluding with the information he had picked up earlier that night from Shimon Pazner.
“So who sent that man to Rome to kill you?”
“I think it’s safe to assume it was the same person who engineered the murder of Max Klein.”
“How did they find you here?”
Gabriel had been asking himself that same question. His suspicions fell upon the rosy-cheeked Austrian rector of the Anima, Bishop Theodor Drexler.
“So where are we going next?” Chiara asked.
“We?”
“Shamron told me to watch your back. You want me to disobey a direct order from the Memuneh?”
“He told you to watch me in Rome.”
“It was an open-ended assignment,” she replied, her tone defiant.
Gabriel lay there for a moment, strokin
g her hair. Truth was, he could use a traveling companion and a second pair of eyes in the field. Given the obvious risks involved, he would have preferred someone other than the woman he loved. But then, she had proven herself a valuable partner.
There was a secure telephone on the bedside table. He dialed Jerusalem and woke Moshe Rivlin from a heavy sleep. Rivlin gave him the name of a man in Buenos Aires, along with a telephone number and an address in the barrio San Telmo. Then Gabriel called Aerolineas Argentinas and booked two business-class seats on a flight the following evening. He hung up the receiver. Chiara rested her cheek against his chest.
“You were shouting something back there in that alley when you were running toward me,” she said. “Do you remember what you were saying?”
He couldn’t. It was as if he had awakened unable to recall the dreams that disturbed his sleep.
“You were calling out to her,” Chiara said.
“Who?”
“Your mother.”
He remembered the image that had flashed before his eyes during that mind-bending flight from the man on the motorino. He supposed it was indeed possible he had been calling out to his mother. Since reading her testimony he had been thinking of little else.
“Are you sure it was Erich Radek who murdered those poor girls in Poland?”
“As sure as one can be sixty years after the fact.”
“And if Ludwig Vogel is actually Erich Radek?”
Gabriel reached up and switched off the lamp.
23
ROME
THE VIA DELLA Pace was deserted. The Clock maker stopped at the gates of the Anima and shut down the engine of the motorino. He reached out, his hand trembling, and pressed the button of the intercom. There was no reply. He rang the bell again. This time an adolescent voice greeted him in Italian. The Clockmaker, in German, asked to see the rector.