by Daniel Silva
“Maybe it’s time you renewed your relationship.”
“I’ve tried, Jason. He’s not interested in talking.”
“Why don’t you give him a call now?”
“Because I’m going home to take a very long bath.”
“And the rest of the weekend?”
“A trashy book. A couple of DVDs. Maybe a walk in Hampstead Heath if it’s not raining.”
“Sounds rather dull.”
“I like dull, Jason. That’s why I’ve always been so fond of you.”
“I’ll be at Café Rouge in an hour.”
“And I’ll see you Monday morning.”
She hung up the phone and watched Martin Landesmann exit the news conference in Geneva, his silver hair aglow in the flashing of a hundred cameras, his stunning French-born wife, Monique, at his side. For a devoutly private man, Landesmann certainly knew how to cut a striking figure on those rare occasions when he stepped onto the public stage. It was one of Martin’s special gifts, his matchless ability to control what the world knew and saw of him. Zoe was quite confident she knew more about Martin Landesmann than any reporter in the world. Yet even she acknowledged that there was much about Saint Martin and his financial empire that was beyond her grasp.
Landesmann’s image was replaced by that of the new American president, who was launching an initiative to improve relations between the United States and one of its most implacable foes, the Islamic Republic of Iran. Zoe switched off the television, glanced at her watch, and swore softly. It was already a few minutes past six. Her plans for the weekend were not as lackluster as she had led Jason to believe. In fact, they were quite extensive. And she was now running late.
She checked her e-mail, then conducted a harsh purge of her voice mail. By 6:15, she was pulling on her overcoat and heading across the newsroom. From inside his large glass-enclosed office, Jason was admiring his magnificent view of the Thames. Sensing Zoe behind him, he pirouetted and engaged in a flagrant attempt to catch her eye. Zoe lowered her gaze toward the carpet and ducked into a waiting elevator.
As the carriage sunk toward the lobby, Zoe examined her reflection in the stainless steel doors. You were left on our doorstep by Gypsies, her mother used to say. It seemed the only possible explanation for how a child of Anglo-Saxon heritage had come into the world with black hair, dark brown eyes, and olive-complected skin. As a young girl, Zoe had been self-conscious about her appearance. But by the time she went up to Cambridge, she knew it was an asset. Zoe’s looks made her stand out from the crowd, as did her obvious intelligence and biting sense of humor. Jason had been smitten the first time she walked into his office. He’d hired her on the spot and expedited her ascent up the ladder of success. In moments of honesty, Zoe admitted that her career had been helped by her looks. But she was also smarter than most of her colleagues. And no one in the newsroom worked harder.
As the elevator doors opened, she spotted a knot of reporters and editors gathered in the lobby, debating a proper setting for that evening’s drinking session. Zoe slipped past with a polite smile—she had acquaintances on the staff but no true friends—and stepped into the street. As usual, she headed across the Thames to the Cannon Street Underground Station. Had home been her true destination, she would have taken a westbound Circle Line train to Embankment and transferred to a Northern Line train to Hampstead. Instead, she stepped onto an eastbound train and rode it as far as St. Pancras Station, the new London terminal for high-speed Eurostar trains.
Tucked into the outside flap of Zoe’s briefcase was a ticket for the 7:09 train to Paris. She purchased several magazines before clearing passport control, then made her way to the departure platform, where the boarding process was already under way. She found her seat in the first-class cabin and in short order was presented with a rather good glass of champagne. A trashy book. A couple of DVDs. Maybe a walk in Hampstead Heath if it’s not raining…Not quite. She peered out the window as the train eased from the station and saw an attractive dark-haired woman gazing back at her. This is the last time, Gypsy girl, she thought. This is the very last time.
24
AMSTERDAM
Few people noticed Eli Lavon’s arrival in Amsterdam the following day, and those who did mistook him for someone else. It was his special talent. Regarded as the finest street surveillance artist the Office had ever produced, Lavon was a ghost of a man who possessed a chameleon-like ability to change his appearance. His greatest asset was his natural anonymity. On the surface, he appeared to be one of life’s downtrodden. In reality, he was a natural predator who could follow a highly trained intelligence officer or hardened terrorist down any street in the world without attracting even a flicker of interest. Ari Shamron liked to say that Lavon could disappear while shaking your hand. It was not far from the truth.
It was Shamron himself, in September 1972, who introduced Lavon to a promising young artist named Gabriel Allon. Though they did not realize it then, both had been selected to take part in what would become one of the most celebrated and controversial missions ever undertaken by Israeli intelligence—Wrath of God, the secret operation to hunt down and assassinate the perpetrators of the Munich Olympics massacre. In the Hebrew-based lexicon of the team, Lavon was an ayin, a tracker and surveillance specialist. Gabriel was an aleph. Armed with a .22 caliber Beretta pistol, he personally assassinated six of the Black September terrorists responsible for Munich. Under Shamron’s unrelenting pressure, they stalked their prey across Western Europe for three years, killing both at night and in broad daylight, living in fear that at any moment they would be arrested and charged as murderers. When they finally returned home, Gabriel’s temples were the color of ash, his face that of a man twenty years his senior. Eli Lavon, who had been exposed to the terrorists for long periods of time with no backup, suffered innumerable stress disorders, including a notoriously fickle stomach that troubled him to this day.
When the Wrath of God unit was formally disbanded, neither Gabriel nor Lavon wanted anything more to do with intelligence work or killing. Gabriel took refuge in Venice to heal paintings while Lavon fled to Vienna, where he opened a small investigative bureau called Wartime Claims and Inquiries. Operating on a shoestring budget, he managed to track down millions of dollars’ worth of looted Holocaust assets and played a significant role in prying a multibillion-dollar settlement from the banks of Switzerland. Lavon’s activities earned him few friends, and in 2003 a bomb exploded inside his office, seriously wounding him and killing two of his employees. Lavon never attempted to rebuild in Vienna, choosing instead to return to Israel and pursue his first love, archaeology. He now served as an adjunct professor at Hebrew University and regularly took part in digs around the country. And twice a year he returned to the Office academy to lecture the new recruits on the fine art of physical surveillance. Invariably, one would ask Lavon about his work with the legendary assassin Gabriel Allon. Lavon’s response never varied: “Gabriel who?”
By training and temperament, Lavon was prone to handle delicate objects with care. That was especially true of the single sheet of paper he accepted in the sitting room of a suite at the Ambassade Hotel. He examined it for several moments in the half-light before placing it on the coffee table and peering curiously at Gabriel and Chiara over his gold half-moon reading glasses.
“I thought you two were hiding out from Shamron in the deepest corner of Cornwall. How in the world did you get this?”
“Is it real?” asked Gabriel.
“Absolutely. But where did it come from?”
Gabriel gave Lavon an account of the investigation thus far, beginning with Julian Isherwood’s unannounced appearance on the cliffs of Lizard Point and ending with the story of Lena Herzfeld. Lavon listened intently, his brown eyes darting back and forth between Gabriel and Chiara. At the conclusion, he studied the document again and shook his head slowly.
“What’s wrong, Eli?”
“I’ve spent years searching for something like this. Leave it to you to s
tumble on it by accident.”
“Something like what, Eli?”
“Proof of his guilt. Oh, I found scraps of corroborating evidence scattered across the graveyards of Europe, but nothing as damning as this.”
“You recognize the name?”
“Kurt Voss?” Lavon nodded his head slowly. “You might say that SS-Hauptsturmführer Kurt Voss and I are old friends.”
“And the signature?”
“To me, it’s as recognizable as Rembrandt’s.” Lavon glanced down at the document. “Whether you ever manage to find Julian’s painting, you’ve already made a major discovery. And it needs to be preserved.”
“I’d be more than happy to entrust it to your capable hands, Eli.”
“I assume there’s a price involved.”
“A small one,” said Gabriel.
“What’s that?”
“Tell me about Voss.”
“It would be my distinct displeasure. But order us some coffee, Gabriel. I’m a bit like Shamron. I can’t tell a story without coffee.”
25
AMSTERDAM
Eli Lavon began with the basic facts of Kurt Voss’s appalling biography.
Born into an upper-class trading family in Köln on October 23, 1906, Voss was sent to the capital for schooling, graduating from the University of Berlin in 1932 with degrees in law and history. In February 1933, within weeks of Hitler’s rise to power, he joined the Nazi Party and was assigned to the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, the security and intelligence service of the SS. For the next several years, he worked at headquarters in Berlin compiling dossiers on enemies of the Party, both real and imagined. Ambitious in all things, Voss courted Frieda Schuler, the daughter of a prominent Gestapo officer, and the two were soon wed at a country estate outside Berlin. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler was in attendance, as was SD chief Reinhard Heydrich, who serenaded the happy couple on the violin. Eighteen months later, Frieda gave birth to a son. Hitler himself sent a note of congratulations.
Voss soon grew bored with his work at SD headquarters and made it clear to his powerful backers he was interested in a more challenging assignment. His opportunity came in March 1938, when German forces rolled unchallenged into Austria. By August, Voss was in Vienna, assigned to the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung, the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. The bureau was led by a ruthless young SS officer who would change the course of Voss’s life.
“Adolf Eichmann,” said Gabriel.
Lavon nodded his head slowly. Eichmann…
The Zentralstelle was headquartered in an ornate Viennese palace appropriated from the Rothschild family. Eichmann’s orders were to cleanse Austria of its large and influential Jewish population through a mechanized program of rapid coerced flight. On any given day, the splendid old rooms and wide halls were overflowing with Jews clamoring to escape the wave of virulent anti-Semitic violence sweeping the country. Eichmann and his team were more than willing to show them the door, provided they first pay a steep toll.
“It was a giant fleecing operation. Jews entered at one end with money and possessions and came out the other with nothing but their lives. The Nazis would later refer to the process as the ‘Vienna model,’ and it was regarded as one of Eichmann’s finest accomplishments. In truth, Voss deserved much of the credit, if you can call it that. He was never far from Eichmann’s side. They used to prowl the corridors of the palace in their black SS uniforms like a pair of young gods. But there was one difference. Eichmann was transparently cruel to his victims, but those who encountered Voss were often struck by his impeccable manners. He always carried himself as though he found the entire process distasteful. In reality, it was just a disguise. Voss was a shrewd businessman. He would search out the well-to-do and pull them into his office for a private chat. Invariably, their money would end up in his pocket. By the time he left Vienna, Kurt Voss was a wealthy man. And he was just getting started.”
By the autumn of 1941, with the Continent engulfed in war, Hitler and his senior henchmen decided that the Jews were to be exterminated. Europe was to be scoured from west to east, with Eichmann and his “deportation experts” operating the levers of death. The able-bodied would be used as slave labor. The rest—the young, the old, the sick, the disabled—would immediately be subjected to “special treatment.” For the nine and a half million Jews living under direct or indirect German rule, it was a catastrophe, a crime without a name.
“But not for Voss,” said Lavon. “For Kurt Voss, it was the business opportunity of a lifetime.”
As the lethal summer of 1942 commenced, Voss and the rest of Eichmann’s team were headquartered in Berlin at 116 Kurfürstenstrasse, an imposing building which, much to Eichmann’s delight, had once housed a Jewish mutual aid society. Known as Department IVB4, these were the men who kept the Continent-wide enterprise of mass murder humming along smoothly.
“Voss had an office just down the hall from Eichmann,” Lavon said. “But he was rarely there. Voss had a roving commission. He approved the deportation lists, supervised the roundups, and secured the necessary trains. And, of course, he expanded his thriving side business, robbing his victims blind before dispatching them to their deaths.”
But Voss’s most lucrative transaction would occur late in the war and in the last country to be ravaged by the fires of the Holocaust: Hungary. When Eichmann arrived in Budapest, he had one goal—finding each and every one of Hungary’s 825,000 Jews and sending them to their deaths at Auschwitz. His trusted aide, Kurt Voss, wanted something else.
“The Bauer-Rubin industrial works,” said Lavon. “The owners were a consortium of highly assimilated Jews, most of whom had either converted to Catholicism or were married to Catholic women. Within days of his arrival in Budapest, Voss summoned them and explained that their days were numbered. But as usual, he had a proposition. If the Bauer-Rubin industrial works were transferred to his control, Voss would make certain that the owners and their families would be granted safe passage to Portugal. As you might expect, the owners quickly agreed to Voss’s demands. The following day, the managing partner, a man named Samuel Rubin, accompanied Voss on a trip to Zurich.”
“Why Zurich?”
“Because that’s where the vast majority of the firm’s assets were held for safekeeping. Voss pulled the company apart piece by piece and moved its holdings to accounts under his control. When his greed was finally satisfied, he allowed Rubin to leave for Portugal and promised that everyone else would follow in short order. It never happened. Rubin was the only one to survive. The rest ended up in Auschwitz along with more than four hundred thousand other Hungarian Jews.”
“And Voss?”
He returned to Berlin on Christmas Eve 1944. But with the war all but lost, Voss and the rest of Eichmann’s desk murderers were treated as outcasts and pariahs, even by some of their colleagues in the SS. As the city shook beneath the Allied air raids, Eichmann turned his lair into a heavily guarded fortress and began hastily destroying his most damning files. Voss the lawyer knew that concealment of such vast crimes was not possible, not with evidence scattered across a continent and thousands of survivors waiting to come forward to tell their stories. Instead, he used his remaining time to more productive ends—gathering his ill-gotten riches and preparing for his escape.
“Eichmann was woefully unprepared when the end finally came. He had no false papers, no money, and no safe house. But not Voss. Voss had a new name, places to hide, and, of course, a great deal of money. On April 30, 1945, the night Hitler committed suicide in his bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery, Kurt Voss shed his SS uniform and slipped out of his office at 116 Kurfürstenstrasse. By morning, he had vanished.”
“And the money?”
“It was gone, too,” said Lavon. “Just like the people it once belonged to.”
26
AMSTERDAM
Gabriel Allon had confronted evil in many forms: terrorists, murderous Russian arms dealers, professional assassins who shed
the blood of strangers for briefcases filled with cash. But none could compare to the genocidal evil of the men and women who had carried out the single greatest act of mass murder in history. They had been a constant if unacknowledged presence inside Gabriel’s childhood home in the Jezreel Valley of Israel. And now that night had fallen over Amsterdam, they had crept into the suite at the Ambassade Hotel. Unable to bear their company any longer, he stood abruptly and informed Eli Lavon and Chiara that he needed to continue the conversation outside. They drifted along the banks of the Herengracht through yellow lamplight, Gabriel and Lavon shoulder to shoulder, Chiara trailing several paces behind.
“She’s too close.”
“She’s not tailing us, Eli. She’s just watching our back.”
“It doesn’t matter. She’s still too close.”
“Shall we stop so you can give her a bit of instruction?”
“She never listens to me. She’s unbelievably stubborn. And far too pretty for street work.” Lavon gave Gabriel a sideways glance. “I’ll never understand what she saw in a fossil like you. It must have been your natural charm and cheerful disposition.”
“You were about to tell me more about Kurt Voss.”
Lavon paused to allow a bicycle to pass. It was ridden by a young woman who was steering with one hand and sending a text message with the other. Lavon gave a fleeting smile, then resumed his lecture.
“Keep one thing in mind, Gabriel. We know a great deal about Voss now, but in the aftermath of the war we barely knew the bastard’s name. And by the time we fully understood the true nature of his crimes, he’d disappeared.”
“Where did he go?”
“Argentina.”
“How did he get there?”
“How do you think?”
“The Church?”
“But of course.”