by Daniel Silva
But these were Lavon’s judgments, not Feliks Adler’s, and by the time he returned to the square he was dreaming only of money. He walked to the Hauptplatz, Linz’s most famous square, and performed a last check for surveillance. Then he headed across the Danube and made his way to a streetcar roundabout, where a pair of modern trams baked in the warm sun, looking as though they had been dropped mistakenly in the wrong city, in the wrong century. On one side of the roundabout was a street called the Gerstnerstrasse, and near the end of the street was a stately door with a brass plaque that read BANK WEBER AG: BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.
Lavon reached for the call button, but something made him hesitate. It was the old fear, the fear he had knocked on too many doors and had walked along too many darkened streets behind men who would have killed him, had they known he was there. Then he thought of a camp that lay twelve miles to the east, and of a city in Syria that was nearly erased from the map. And he wondered whether somewhere there was a link, an arc of evil, between the two. A sudden anger rose within him, which he tempered by straightening his necktie and smoothing what remained of his hair. Then he placed his thumb firmly atop the call button and, in a voice not his own, declared that he was Feliks Adler and that he had business within. A few seconds elapsed, which to Lavon seemed like an eternity. Finally, the locks opened and a buzzer jolted him like the starting gun of a race. He drew a deep breath, placed his hand upon the latch, and headed inside.
Beyond the door was a vestibule, and beyond the vestibule was a waiting room where there sat a young Upper Austrian girl who was so pale and pretty she looked scarcely real. The girl was apparently used to unwanted attention from men like Herr Adler, for the greeting she gave him was at once cordial and dismissive. She offered him a chair in her waiting room, which he accepted, and coffee, which he politely declined. He sat with his knees together and his hands folded in his lap, as though he were waiting on the platform of a country rail station. On the wall above his head an American financial news network played silently on a television. On the table at his elbow were copies of the world’s important economic journals, along with several magazines extolling the benefits of life in the mountains of Austria.
Finally, the telephone on the young woman’s desk chimed, and she announced that Herr Weber—Herr Markus Weber, president and founder of Bank Weber AG—would see him now. He was waiting beyond the next door, an emaciated figure, tall, bald, bespectacled, wearing an undertaker’s dark suit and a superior smile. He shook Lavon’s hand solemnly, as though consoling him over the death of a distant aunt, and led him along a corridor hung with oil paintings of mountain lakes and meadows in bloom. At the end of the hall was a desk where another woman, older than the first and darker in hair color and complexion, sat peering into the screen of a computer. Herr Weber’s office was to the right; to the left was the office that belonged to his partner, Waleed al-Siddiqi. The door to Mr. al-Siddiqi’s office was tightly closed. Posted outside it were two matching bodyguards who stood with the stillness of potted palms. Their tailored suits could not conceal the fact that both were armed.
Lavon nodded toward the two men, eliciting not so much as a blink, and then looked at the woman. Her hair was as black as a raven’s wing and fell almost to the shoulders of her dark suit jacket. Her eyes were wide and brown; her nose was straight and prominent. The overall impression left by her appearance was one of seriousness and, perhaps, a trace of distant sadness. Lavon glanced at her left hand and saw that the third finger was absent a wedding band or a ring of betrothal. He placed her age at perhaps forty, the danger zone for spinsterhood. She was not unattractive, but she was not quite pretty, either. The subtle arrangement of bones and flesh that comprise the human face had conspired to make her ordinary.
“This is Jihan Nawaz,” Herr Weber announced. “Miss Nawaz is our account manager.”
Her greeting was only slightly more pleasant than the one Lavon had received from the Austrian receptionist. He released her cool hand quickly and followed Herr Weber into his office. The furnishings were modern but comfortable, and the floor was covered by a lush carpet that seemed to absorb all sound. Herr Weber directed Lavon toward a chair before settling behind his desk. “How may I be of assistance?” he said, suddenly all business.
“I’m interested in placing a sum of money in your care,” replied Lavon.
“May I ask how you heard about our bank?”
“A business associate is a client here.”
“Might I ask his name?”
“I’d rather not say.”
Herr Weber raised a palm, as if to say he understood fully.
“I do have one question,” Lavon said. “Is it true the bank had some difficulty a few years back?”
“That’s correct,” conceded Weber. “Like many European banking institutions, we were hit hard by the collapse of the American real estate market and the ensuing financial crisis.”
“And so you were forced to take on a partner?”
“Actually, I was pleased to do it.”
“Mr. al-Siddiqi.”
Weber nodded carefully.
“He is from Lebanon, I take it?”
“Syria, actually.”
“A pity.”
“What’s that?”
“The war,” replied Lavon.
Weber’s blank expression made it clear he was not interested in discussing the current state of affairs in his partner’s country of origin. “You speak German as though you come from Vienna,” he said after a moment.
“I lived there for a period of time.”
“And now?”
“I carry a Canadian passport, but I prefer to think of myself as a citizen of the world.”
“Money knows no international boundaries these days.”
“Which is why I’ve come to Linz.”
“You’ve been here before?”
“Many times,” answered Lavon truthfully.
Weber’s phone rang.
“Would you mind?”
“Not at all.”
The Austrian lifted the receiver to his ear and stared directly at Lavon while listening to the voice at the other end of the line. The thick carpeting swallowed his murmured response. Then he hung up the phone and asked, “Where were we?”
“You were about to assure me that your bank is solvent and stable and that my money will be safe here.”
“Both those things are true, Herr Adler.”
“I’m also interested in discretion.”
“As you undoubtedly know,” Weber replied, “Austria recently agreed to some modifications in our banking system to please our European neighbors. That said, our secrecy laws remain among the strictest in the world.”
“It is my understanding you have a ten-million-euro minimum for new clients.”
“That is our policy.” Weber paused, then asked, “Is there a problem, Herr Adler?”
“None at all.”
“I thought that would be your answer. You strike me as a very serious person.”
Herr Adler accepted this flattery with a nod of his head. “Who else inside the bank will know that I have an account here?”
“Myself and Miss Nawaz.”
“What about Mr. al-Siddiqi?”
“Mr. al-Siddiqi has his clients, I have mine.” Weber tapped his gold fountain pen against his leather desk blotter. “Well, Herr Adler, how shall we proceed?”
“It is my intention to place ten million euros under your management. I would like you to hold five million of that in cash. The rest I would like you to invest. Nothing too complicated,” he added. “My goal is wealth preservation, not wealth creation.”
“You won’t be disappointed,” replied Weber. “You should know, however, that we charge a fee for our services.”
“Yes,” said Lavon, smiling. “Secrecy has its price.”
Armed with his gold fountain pen, the banker jotted down a few of Lavon’s particulars, none of which happened to be true. For his password, he chose “qua
rry,” a reference to the slave labor pit at Mauthausen that went soaring over the shining bald head of Herr Weber, who, as it turned out, had never found the time to visit the Holocaust memorial located a few miles from the town of his birth.
“The password has to do with the nature of my business,” explained Lavon through a false smile.
“Your business is mining, Herr Adler?”
“Something like that.”
With that, the banker rose and entrusted him to the care of Miss Nawaz, the account manager. There were forms to be filled out, declarations to be signed, and pledges to be made by both parties regarding secrecy and adherence to tax laws. The addition of ten million euros to Bank Weber’s balance sheets did little to soften her standoffish demeanor. She was not naturally cold, Lavon reckoned; it was something else. He looked at the pair of bodyguards posed outside the door of Waleed al-Siddiqi, the Syrian-born savior of Bank Weber AG. Then he looked again at Jihan Nawaz.
“An important client?” he asked.
She stared at him blankly. “How do you wish to fund the account?” she asked.
“A wire transfer would be most convenient.”
She handed him a slip of paper on which was written the routing number for the bank.
“Shall we do it now?” asked Lavon.
“As you wish.”
Lavon withdrew his mobile phone and rang a reputable bank in Brussels that was not aware of the fact it controlled much of the Office’s operational funds for Europe. He informed his banker that he wished to wire ten million euros posthaste to Bank Weber AG of Linz, Austria. Then he hung up the phone and smiled again at Jihan Nawaz.
“You will have the money by midday tomorrow at the latest,” he said.
“Shall I call you with confirmation?”
“Please.”
Herr Adler handed her a business card. She reciprocated by handing him one of her own.
“If there’s anything more you require, Herr Adler, please don’t hesitate to call me directly. I’ll help you, if I can.”
Lavon slipped the card into the breast pocket of his suit jacket, along with his mobile phone. Rising, he shook the hand of Jihan Nawaz a final time before making his way toward reception, where the pretty young Austrian girl stood waiting for him. As he moved along the carpeted hall, he could feel the eyes of the two bodyguards boring into his back, but he didn’t dare look over his shoulder. He was afraid, he thought. And so was Jihan Nawaz.
34
KING SAUL BOULEVARD, TEL AVIV
IT SEEMS DIFFICULT TO IMAGINE, but there was once a time when human beings did not feel the need to share their every waking moment with hundreds of millions, even billions, of complete and utter strangers. If one went to a shopping mall to purchase an article of clothing, one did not post minute-by-minute details on a social networking site; and if one made a fool of oneself at a party, one did not leave a photographic record of the sorry episode in a digital scrapbook that would survive for all eternity. But now, in the era of lost inhibition, it seemed no detail of life was too mundane or humiliating to share. In the online age, it was more important to live out loud than to live with dignity. Internet followers were more treasured than flesh-and-blood friends, for they held the illusive promise of celebrity, even immortality. Were Descartes alive today, he might have written: I tweet, therefore I am.
Employers had learned long ago that the online presence of an individual spoke volumes about his character. Not surprisingly, the world’s intelligence services had discovered the same thing. In a bygone time, spies had to open mail and rummage through drawers to learn the deepest secrets of a potential target or recruit. Now all they had to do was tap a few keys, and the secrets came spilling into their laps: names of friends and enemies, lost loves and old wounds, secret passions and desires. In the hands of a skilled operative, such details were a veritable road map to the human heart. They allowed him to push any button, tap any emotion, almost at will. It was easy to make a target feel afraid, for example, if the target had already voluntarily handed over the keys to his fear centers. The same was true if the operative wished to make the target feel happy.
Jihan Nawaz, account manager of Bank Weber AG, born in Syria, naturalized citizen of Germany, was no exception. Technologically savvy, she was a Facebook pioneer, an inveterate user of Twitter, and had recently discovered the delights of Instagram. By scouring her accounts, the team learned that she lived in a small apartment just beyond the perimeter of Linz’s Innere Stadt, that she had a troublesome cat called Cleopatra, and that her car, an old Volvo, had given her no end of grief. They learned the names of her favorite bars and nightclubs, her favorite restaurants, and the café where she stopped each morning for coffee and bread on the way to work. They learned, too, that she had never been married and that her last serious boyfriend had treated her deplorably. Mainly, they learned that she had never managed to penetrate the innate xenophobia of the Austrians and that she was lonely. It was a story the team understood well. Jihan Nawaz, like the Jews before her, was the stranger.
Curiously, there were two elements of her life about which Jihan Nawaz never spoke online: her place of work or the country of her birth. Nor was there any mention of the bank or Syria in the mountain of private e-mail that the hackers of Unit 8200, Israel’s electronic surveillance service, unearthed from her multiple accounts. Eli Lavon, who had experienced the tense atmosphere inside the bank, wondered whether Jihan was only following an edict laid down by Waleed al-Siddiqi, the man who worked behind a locked door, guarded by a pair of armed Alawites. But Bella Navot suspected the source of Jihan’s silence resided elsewhere. And so, as the rest of the team sifted through the digital debris, Bella headed to the file rooms of Research and started digging.
The first twenty-four hours of her search produced nothing of value. Then, on a hunch, she dug out her old files on an incident that had occurred in Syria in February 1982. Under Bella’s direction, the Office had produced two definitive accounts of the incident—a highly classified document for use inside Israel’s intelligence community, and an unclassified white paper that was released to the public through the Foreign Ministry. Both versions of the report contained the eyewitness testimony of a young girl, but Bella had withheld her name in both documents in order to protect her identity. Deep within her personal research files, however, was a transcript of the girl’s original statement, and at the end of the transcript was her name. Two minutes later, breathless after sprinting from Research to Room 456C, she placed the document triumphantly in front of Gabriel. “It’s Hama,” she said. “The poor thing was at Hama.”
“How much do we really know about Waleed al-Siddiqi?”
“Enough to know he’s the one we’re looking for, Uzi.”
“Humor me, Gabriel.”
Navot removed his eyeglasses and massaged the bridge of his nose, something he always did when he was not certain how to proceed. He was seated at his large glass desk, with one foot resting on the blotter. Behind him an orange sun was sinking slowly toward the surface of the Mediterranean. Gabriel watched it for a moment. It had been a long time since he had seen the sun.
“He’s an Alawite,” he said at last, “originally from Aleppo. When he was working in Damascus, he billed himself as a relative of the ruling family. As you might expect, there’s no mention of his blood ties in any of Bank Weber’s brochures.”
“How is he related?”
“Apparently, he’s a distant cousin of the mother, which is significant. The mother is the one who told her son to come down like a ton of bricks on the protesters.”
“Sounds as though you’ve been hanging around with my wife.”
“I have.”
Navot smiled. “So Waleed al-Siddiqi is a charter member of Evil Incorporated?”
“That’s what I’m saying, Uzi.”
“How did he make his money?”
“He started his career in Syria’s state-run pharmaceutical industry, which is also significant.”
Gabriel nodded slowly. “Al-Siddiqi made certain that a good portion of the industry’s profits flowed directly into the coffers of the family. He also made certain that Western firms wishing do business in Syria paid for the privilege in the form of bribes and commissions. Along the way al-Siddiqi became very rich.” Gabriel paused, then added, “Rich enough to buy a bank.”
Navot frowned. “When did al-Siddiqi leave Syria?”
“Four years ago.”
“Just as the Arab Spring was in full bloom,” Navot pointed out.
“It was no coincidence. Al-Siddiqi was looking for a safe place to manage the family fortune. And he found one when a small bank in Linz got into trouble during the Great Recession.”
“You think the money is being held in accounts at Bank Weber?”
“A portion of it,” answered Gabriel. “And he’s controlling the rest by using Bank Weber as his calling card.”
“Is Herr Weber in on it?”
“I’m not sure.”
“What about the girl?”
“No,” said Gabriel. “She doesn’t know.”
“How can you be certain?”
“Because a kissing cousin of the Syrian ruler would never trust a girl from Hama to be his account manager.”
Navot lowered his feet to the floor and laid his heavy forearms upon the desktop. The glass seemed in danger of shattering beneath the strain of his powerful body.
“So what do you have in mind?” he asked.
“She’s looking for a friend,” replied Gabriel. “I’m going to give her one.”
“Boy or girl?”
“Girl,” said Gabriel. “Definitely a girl.”
“Who are you planning to use?”
Gabriel answered.
“She’s an analyst.”