Spy Dance

by Allan Topol

  “Hey, Hal, I didn’t realize that I rated a receiving party.”

  “You don’t. So don’t get excited.”

  “Then what are you doin’ here, little buddy?”

  Carlton’s nickname for Vernon grew out of the latter’s height, which was just an inch over five feet.

  “Surveillance and baby-sitting. Trying to keep tabs on a little girl and make sure she stays safe while she’s in Zurich. It’s very top-level stuff. Mrs. Joyner called me herself.”

  “Who’s the baby?”

  “Name’s Alexandra Holt. They faxed me a picture. Dark hair. A pretty good looker.”

  “Let me see.”

  While continuing to keep his eye on passengers emerging from the arrival hall, Hal reached into the pocket of his black leather jacket and handed Peter the fax.

  “Holy shit,” Peter said. He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes from the night on the plane and looked at the picture a second time.

  “You like her that much?”

  “No, it’s just that...”

  “Here comes our little girl, Alexandra Holt,” Hal said, nodding in Sagit’s direction as she walked through the exit.

  “That’s her, okay. You can bet it.”

  “You know her?”

  “Take me with you. I’ll tell you in the car.”

  Sagit spotted Rivka, and the two of them cut quickly across the terminal toward the exit for the parking lot. So intent were Peter and Hal to follow the fast-moving Israeli women that they never saw the two Frenchmen who fell in behind them.

  Once they were in the car, and following the green Opel with Alexandra Holt inside, Peter said to Hal, “This doesn’t compute. First General Chambers told me that this lady is an Israeli spy who’s trying to make off with top-secret information. Now Ms. Joyner wants you to make sure she stays safe.”

  Hal shrugged. “I’ve met the other one before. Rivkin’s her name. She’s definitely Mossad. Has a phony position on their embassy staff for cover. As far as what’s going on…” he snickered. “at our level, we just follow orders. Ours is not to reason why. Ours is just to...“

  “Yeah, I know. Do or die.”

  “Well, didn’t you learn that long ago? They’re mostly morons in Washington, anyhow. We have to assume they changed their minds between the time you received your orders and when I received my call. Nothing else makes sense. Now, the most recent order is to keep Ms. Holt safe. So that’s the way we play it.”

  Peter wasn’t fully convinced, but he didn’t argue. “I guess so. I’ll even help you if you’ll travel around with me for a few days after Alexandra Holt, or whatever her name is, leaves your turf. General Chambers told me to have a good time at the government’s expense.”

  Hal’s eyes lit up. “You’ve got a deal. Let’s go to St. Moritz, where the high rollers hang out.”

  “Any action there?”

  “You can gamble to your heart’s content.”

  Peter laughed lasciviously and poked Hal playfully on the shoulder. “No, I mean pussy.”

  “Don’t be such a damn provincial, Peter. With European women there’s always plenty of pussy around.”

  “Now, don’t you go taking on pseudo-sophisticated European airs with me, little buddy. You and I both are Texans.”

  Hal was glancing nervously in the rearview mirror. Outside, it was a gloomy morning, but even so he’d noticed that they were being followed by a black Mercedes as they headed toward the center of Zurich. Or maybe they weren’t being followed. Maybe it was Alexandra Holt and the other woman in the green Opel who were being followed. When the green Opel cut into the left passing lane, Hal held back. Sure enough, the Mercedes surged forward, moving up behind the Opel. Hal kept his eye on the Mercedes. It had French plates. There were two men in the front, and they seemed intent on following the women. He doubted if they knew he and Peter were there.

  “Ms. Holt and friend have company,” Hal told Peter. “Two men in a black Mercedes with frog plates.”

  Peter leaned forward, straining to see the two cars in the gray morning mist. Then he turned to Hal. “Life’s suddenly gotten very interesting. You got a piece?”

  “Are you kidding? This is Switzerland. People don’t carry guns.”

  Peter was nonplussed and dismayed. “Really?”

  “Yeah, really.” Hal chuckled and pointed at the holster at his hip.

  “What about for me?”

  When the three cars stopped for a red light, Hal reached down to his ankle holster and tossed a Beretta to Peter.

  “Now we’re just a couple of Texas boys out for a little morning’s entertainment.”

  * * *

  In the green Opel, Sagit said to Rivka, “We’re being followed by two men in a black Mercedes with French license plates F1625.”

  “You want me to try and lose them?”

  “No, don’t bother. I have a feeling they know where I’m going an hour from now. Do what you planned to do. I doubt if they know we’ve spotted them. We’ll have the element of surprise this way.”

  They passed the train station and turned down the Bahnhofstrasse. At the far end, without any warning, the green Opel made a sharp turn into the parking garage just behind the Bar du Lac Hotel. The Mercedes remained on the street.

  When Rivka had parked on the second level and they were getting out of the car, Sagit said, “Pop the trunk.”

  She rummaged inside, checking the contents of the trunk. Then she extracted a tire iron, which she concealed under her coat. As they crossed from the garage into the hotel via the bridge on the second level, she and Rivka looked around warily, but no one was lurking in the hall.

  In the hotel dining room, Sagit told the waiter: the table against the wall, as far as possible from the door or any window. She placed her coat on the floor, next to her chair, with the tire iron still concealed.

  “Now we’ll have breakfast,” she said. She asked a tuxedo-clad waiter to bring hot chocolate for Rivka, coffee for her and a plate of pastries.

  When the food arrived, Rivka took a bite of a croissant and a sip of chocolate before she began talking. “Moshe called me last night. Actually, this morning might be more accurate.”

  “Did he tell you what this is all about?”

  “You know Moshe. He just gave me the essential facts. I’m supposed to tell you that you have an eleven o’clock appointment with a vice president of Credit Suisse about four blocks down the Bahnhofstrasse. His name is Helmut Gauber. He’s from a long line of Swiss bankers. A real Zurich establishment family. The good news is that in the early 1960’s, while he was in college, our friend Helmut happened to meet and fall in love with a Jewish girl named Anna.

  “Her parents had both been born in Milan. Like many other Italian Jews, they did okay during the war, when it was Mussolini. Once the Germans moved into northern Italy at the end of ‘43, they rounded up all of the Jews to send them off to the death camps. Somehow Anna’s father managed to smuggle his wife and two-year-old Anna across the border. Moshe thinks he paid somebody to row them across the lake from Stresa at night. The rower would only take the mother and baby. Anna’s father died with the rest of the family.”

  Rivka had to stop talking and take deep breaths. Her own grandparents were survivors of Treblinka. Most of her family had perished in the Holocaust.

  “Helmut was only three or four years old when the war ended. So he grows up, marries Anna, and goes into the banking business like everybody else in his family. He starts to learn about the world’s best-kept dirty secret, how the Swiss banks not only took and kept for all those years money deposited by Jews who were being killed by the Germans, but how they helped finance the German war effort. What particularly outraged him was that the Swiss banks accepted gold the Nazis looted from Jews, including dental fillings, wedding rings and watches that had been smelted into gold bars and provided the Nazis with hard currency in return for the gold to buy equipment. Anyhow, Anna wanted to go to Israel to visit as a tourist. So Helmut goes al
ong with her for a vacation. Together they go to Yad Vashem. They see the names of her father and other family members whom the Nazis killed. For the first time, Anna tells Helmut that her father had a successful leather factory in Milan, a big house and lots of art. He can guess where their money and property went. Right into his hometown, maybe even his bank. He’s beside himself with guilt and anger. Not just for how his countrymen behaved during the war, but how they responded once their dirty little secret came out. In Israel, he also visits with Israeli bankers, to see how the banking business is run in Tel Aviv, and somebody tells Moshe about him. They meet over coffee. He tells Moshe, ‘If I can ever do anything to help you, please let me know.”

  “So I’m to be the beneficiary of Helmut’s guilt,” Sagit said sarcastically.

  “You could put it that way.”

  Sagit pulled her hands up from her lap and held them out to Rivka. “How else would you put it?”

  Rivka took a deep breath and swallowed hard. Since she had been stationed in Switzerland, she had gotten used to hearing expressions of cynicism from her fellow Israelis about the Swiss. Some were justified; others were not. “I would say that you’re the beneficiary of Helmut’s decency. His father and grandfather may have been villains, but Helmut’s a good man. He risks losing his job, going to jail and never working again in his country, if he gives you what you want.”

  Sagit was still skeptical. “Did he tell Moshe he’ll give it to me?”

  Rivka glanced around the room, studying the other diners—mostly businessmen having a breakfast meeting, a few tourists, dressed more casually, no one who looked suspicious. Neither of the men from the Mercedes were anywhere to in sight. Not surprisingly, they didn’t want to make their move in the crowded restaurant. She turned back to Sagit. “Moshe called him last night. Helmut agreed to talk to you. That’s all. So he has no idea what you want.”

  Sagit groaned. “Oh, great. Helmut’s back home now. The enthusiasm he felt in Israel is over, I’ll bet.”

  “Maybe yes and maybe no. You’ll have to convince him yourself.”

  “Are you supposed to come with me to the meeting with Helmut?”

  “Moshe thought one-on-one was better. I’m just the chauffeur. I’ll drop you off and wait for you in front of the bank. Assuming we make it that far.”

  “You mean because of our friends in the Mercedes waiting outside?” Rivka nodded.

  “Oh, we’ll make it all right,” Sagit said.

  Before they left the restaurant, Sagit asked the waiter for an empty wine bottle, and she slipped a pack of matches from the table into her pocket.

  She peeked out of a side window off the hotel lobby and saw that the Mercedes was still parked, alone, on the street, with the two men inside keeping warm with the engine running.

  She and Rivka retraced their route back to the green Opel—up to the second floor of the hotel and across the bridge. While Rivka kept her eye on the entrance to the garage, Sagit checked their car to make certain no one had planted a bomb when they were in the restaurant. Then she opened the trunk and filled the wine bottle with gasoline from the can Rivka kept in case she ran out of fuel. She tore off a piece of a rag in the trunk, saturated it with gasoline and stuffed it into the top of the bottle to serve as a wick.

  “Wait ten minutes,” Sagit told Rivka. “Then you start the car and drive slowly down toward the exit, but not close enough that those men can get a direct line with their gun.”

  Meantime, Sagit scrambled back across the bridge and down the stairs in the hotel. She exited the hotel through a side entrance and snuck up on the Mercedes from the rear, in a low crouch, trying to avoid detection through the car’s mirrors, with the tire iron gripped hard in her right hand and the bottle of gasoline in her left.

  When she was twenty feet from the Mercedes, she put down the tire iron and held a lit match to the wick on the bottle. Then she rolled the bottle toward the car. At that instant, the man on the passenger side spotted her and jumped out of the car with an AK-47 in his hand. She ducked behind a building, but he saw her and gave chase, spraying bullets as he ran. Meantime, the car exploded with the driver still inside.

  She ran down an alley that was a dead end. Boxed in by brick walls on all sides, she thought she was doomed. Still, she ran from side to side in a zigzag pattern, dodging bullets.

  Suddenly from nowhere, a shot rang out, and her assailant crumpled to the ground. Standing next to him was a man with a closely cropped light brown crew cut, whom she had noticed in line behind her at Dulles Airport and on the airplane.

  Rivka, who left the Opel in the garage, ran up to Sagit.

  “Quick,” the man with the crew cut said. “Come with me. Both of you.”

  While pedestrians shrieked Peter led the women to Hal’s car, waiting with the engine running. Hal kicked it into gear and roared away.

  As Sagit tried to catch her breath in the backseat, Hal said to her, “Margaret Joyner sent me. She wanted to make sure you stayed safe.”

  “You’re CIA then.”

  Rivka interjected. “He’s Hal Vernon, their Zurich branch chief.”

  Hal was pleased that she remembered him from their one previous encounter at a gathering of U.S. and Israeli intelligence agents in Europe, related to the spread of Soviet weapons. “And this is my friend Peter,” he added.

  Sagit let her breath out in a large whoosh. She was so relieved that she had told Margaret she was going to Zurich.

  “You saved my life,” she said to Peter. “I can’t thank you enough.”

  “Yeah, well I’m not real fond of people who try to blow somebody away with an AK-47.”

  “Where are you taking us?” she asked.

  Hal responded, “Tell me where you want to go.”

  Rivka gave him the address of Credit Suisse on the Bahnhofstrasse.

  He made a sharp and headed toward the bank.

  “Peter and I will wait in the car for you in front. After you’re done there, we’ll take you anywhere else you want to go.”

  * * *

  Victor Foch hung up the phone and paced his office angrily. “Merde,” he cursed aloud.

  He still couldn’t believe the report he had gotten from his Zurich contact. Both men were dead, two experienced assassins, and the Israeli woman didn’t even have a scratch. He knew the Mossad was good, but how in the world did this woman ever pull it off?

  He wanted to shout aloud with frustration, but he got himself under control. “Think,” he told himself. “Think.”

  She was going into the bank now. She seemed to have three bodyguards—two men and a woman. They must be Mossad agents. Let’s assume, Victor thought, that she comes out of the bank with the evidence that would be devastating if it got to Washington. What can I do to stop her?

  Doing anything else in Zurich was hopeless now, but... there was another way... a better way to block her from bringing that evidence to Washington. He didn’t have much time. He had to move quickly to get everything in place. He couldn’t fail, or... He didn’t even want to imagine what Madame Blanc would do to him. Not to mention the fact that the millions and millions of dollars he planned to make on this Saudi deal would disappear into thin air. It can’t happen he thought with renewed determination. I won’t let it happen.

  * * *

  Sagit tried to shake off her fright from her perilously close escape. After identifying herself to a receptionist inside the bank, and while waiting for Helmut Gauber or his secretary to come for her, she went to the ladies room to make herself presentable.

  When she returned to the reception area, Helmut, tall and thin, smartly dressed in a gray pinstriped three-button suit and black wing-tipped shoes, was waiting for her. Across his vest he wore a gold chain that undoubtedly held a watch in the pocket at one end. He greeted her formally and coldly, as any banker would greet a potential client. Then he led her into the elevator and up to his office on the third floor. Alone in the elevator, as they rode in silence, she studied him carefully fo
r body language. Looking proud and defiant, he didn’t seem like a man who was afraid of violating the law. On the other hand, he seemed so cold and aloof that she couldn’t imagine him being moved emotionally, even by what he had seen at Yad Vashem.

  When they reached his office, he offered her coffee and waited until his secretary had deposited two cups of espresso and departed behind the closed door before beginning in a clear, bold tone, “I want to help. Tell me what you want.”

  She breathed a huge sigh of relief. This was a good start, but what would he say when he heard her request? She cleared her throat and said, “I have an account number. I need copies of the signature card opening the account and copies of all documents showing any deposits or withdrawals from the account.”

  Without batting an eye, Helmut swiveled around in his chair to face an IBM PC.

  “What’s the account number?”

  “55XQ3.”

  Swiftly, he punched a number of computer buttons and waited until the printer spat out several pages. Helmut studied them carefully and handed them to her.

  Yes, she thought, elated. Yes! David was right.

  General Chambers had opened the account on the 31st of August, this year. Among the papers Helmut handed her was a copy of the signature card and other documents, confirming that transfers in the amount of fifteen million dollars each, from an account at this bank in the name of Alpha Corp., had been made into General Chambers’ account on August 31 and September 20 of this year. Then on September 21, he had withdrawn all of the money in the form of a cashier’s check payable to Bradley Chambers.

  She looked up at Gauber, who said, “You’re probably wondering what happened to the cashier’s check.”

  She nodded.

  “That, unfortunately, I can’t get from the computer. It would require following official procedures, which I don’t think either of us would want to do.”

  “Agreed.”