by Daniel Silva
“Konrad Becker, meet Oskar Lange.”
The banker sat motionless for a long moment, as though he had been suddenly bronzed. Then his clever little eyes settled on Shamron, and he raised his hands in an inquiring gesture.
“What am I supposed to do with him?”
“You tell us. He’s very good, our Oskar.”
“Can he impersonate a lawyer?”
“With the right preparation, he could impersonate your mother.”
“How long does this charade have to last?”
“Five minutes, maybe less.”
“When you’re with Ludwig Vogel, five minutes can seem like an eternity.”
“So I’ve heard,” Shamron said.
“What about Klaus?”
“Klaus?”
“Vogel’s bodyguard.”
Shamron smiled. Resistance had ended. The Swiss banker had joined the team. He now swore allegiance to the flag of Herr Heller and his noble endeavor.
“He’s very professional,” Becker said. “I’ve been to the house a half-dozen times, but he always gives me a thorough search and asks me to open my briefcase. So, if you’re thinking about trying to get a weapon into the house—”
Shamron cut him off. “We have no intention of bringing weapons in the house.”
“Klaus is always armed.”
“You’re sure?”
“A Glock, I’d say.” The banker patted the left side of his chest. “Wears it right there. Doesn’t make much of an effort to hide it.”
“A lovely piece of detail, Herr Becker.”
The banker accepted the compliment with a tilt of his head—Details are my business, Herr Heller.
“Forgive my insolence, Herr Heller, but how does one actually kidnap someone who’s protected by a bodyguard if the bodyguard is armed and the kidnapper isn’t?”
“Herr Vogel is going to leave his house voluntarily.”
“A voluntary kidnapping?” Becker’s tone was incredulous. “How unique. And how does one convince a man to allow himself to be kidnapped voluntarily?”
Shamron folded his arms. “Just get Oskar inside the house and leave the rest to us.”
32
MUNICH
IT WAS AN OLD apartment house in the pretty little Munich district of Lehel, with a gate on the street and the main entrance off a tidy courtyard. The lift was fickle and indecisive, and more often than not, they simply climbed the spiral staircase to the third floor. The furnishings had a hotel room anonymity. There were two beds in the bedroom, and the sitting room couch was a davenport. In the storage closet were four extra cots. The pantry was stocked with nonperishable goods, and the cabinets contained place settings for eight. The sitting-room windows overlooked the street, but the blackout shades remained drawn at all times, so that inside the flat it seemed a perpetual evening. The telephones had no ringers. Instead, they were fitted with red lights that flashed to indicate incoming calls.
The walls of the sitting room were hung with maps: central Vienna, metropolitan Vienna, eastern Austria, Poland. On the wall opposite the windows hung a very large map of central Europe, which showed the entire escape route, stretching from Vienna to the Baltic coast. Shamron and Gabriel had quarreled briefly over the color before settling on red. From a distance it seemed a river of blood, which is precisely how Shamron wanted it to appear, the river of blood that had flowed through the hands of Erich Radek.
They spoke only German in the flat. Shamron had decreed it. Radek was referred to as Radek and only Radek; Shamron would not call him by the name he’d bought from the Americans. Shamron laid down other edicts as well. It was Gabriel’s operation, and therefore it was Gabriel’s show to run. It was Gabriel, in the Berlin accent of his mother, who briefed the teams, Gabriel who reviewed the watch reports from Vienna, and Gabriel who made all final operational decisions.
For the first few days, Shamron struggled to fit into his supporting role, but as his confidence in Gabriel grew, he found it easier to slide into the background. Still, every agent who passed through the safe flat took note of the dark pall that had settled over him. He seemed never to sleep. He would stand before the maps at all hours, or sit at the kitchen table in the dark, chain-smoking like a man wrestling with a guilty conscience. “He’s like a terminal patient who’s planning his own funeral,” remarked Oded, a veteran German-speaking agent whom Gabriel had chosen to drive the escape car. “And if it goes to hell, they’ll chisel it on his tombstone, right below the Star of David.”
Under perfect circumstances, such an operation would involve weeks of planning. Gabriel had only days. The Wrath of God operation had prepared him well. The terrorists of Black September had been constantly on the move, appearing and disappearing with maddening frequency. When one was located and positively identified, the hit team would swing into action at light speed. Surveillance teams would swoop into place, vehicles and safe flats would be rented, escape routes would be planned. That reservoir of experience and knowledge served Gabriel well in Munich. Few intelligence officers knew more about rapid planning and quick strikes than he and Shamron.
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 mea sure 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 GABRIEL 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. Carryout 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 seriou
s 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.