by Daniel Silva
Gabriel had come through the lobby just once, the day after his first encounter with Shamron. From that point forward, he had only entered the building “black,” through the underground garage. He did so again now, with Chiara and Eli Lavon at his side. They made their way down three flights of stairs, then followed an empty corridor to a doorway marked 456C. The room on the other side had once been a dumping ground for obsolete computers and worn-out furniture, often used by the night staff as a clandestine meeting place for romantic trysts. It was now known throughout King Saul Boulevard only as Gabriel’s Lair. The keyless cipher lock was set to the numeric version of his date of birth. According to one Office wit, it was the most closely guarded secret in all of Israel.
“What’s wrong?” Eli Lavon asked when Gabriel’s hand hesitated over the keypad.
“A senior moment.”
“You can’t remember your own birthday?”
“No,” said Gabriel, punching in the code. “I just can’t believe it was that long ago.”
He entered the room, switched on the overhead lights, and looked around at the walls. They were littered with the debris and the ghosts of operations past. All had resulted in innocent lives being saved, and all were soaked in blood, much of it Gabriel’s. He went to the chalkboard, the last chalkboard in the entire building, and saw faint traces of his own handwriting—the outlines of an operation known by the code name Masterpiece. It had resulted in the successful sabotage of Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities, and had purchased Israel and the West several years of critical time. Now it seemed that time was running out. The Iranians were once again on the doorstep of realizing their nuclear dreams. And it appeared they intended to punish anyone who tried to stand in their way, using Hezbollah, their eager proxy, as their instrument of vengeance.
“If the Office ever builds a museum,” Lavon said, “it won’t be complete unless it contains a replica of this room.”
“What would they call the exhibit?”
“The village of the damned.”
The response had come not from Lavon but from the tall, tweedy figure standing in the doorway, a thin file folder beneath his arm. Yossi Gavish was a senior officer from Research, the Office’s analytical division. Born in London and educated at All Souls, he still spoke Hebrew with a pronounced English accent and was incapable of working without a steady supply of Earl Grey tea and McVitie’s digestive biscuits.
“I can’t believe I’m back here again,” he said.
“Neither can I.” Gabriel nodded toward the file and asked, “What have you got there?”
“The sum total of what the Office currently knows about Carlo Marchese.” He dropped the file onto one of the worktables and looked around. “Does Uzi expect the four of us to take on Carlo and Hezbollah on our own?”
“Don’t worry,” Gabriel said, smiling. “The others will be here soon.”
It took the better part of the morning for Personnel to track down the remaining members of Gabriel’s team and cast them downward into his windowless little dungeon. For the most part, the extractions went smoothly, but in a handful of cases they encountered unexpectedly stiff local resistance. All complaints were forwarded directly to Uzi Navot, who made it clear he would tolerate no dissent. “This is not the Arab world,” he told one disgruntled division chief. “This is the Office. And we are still totalitarians.”
They arrived at irregular intervals, like members of an infiltration team returning to base after a successful night raid. First came Yaakov Rossman, a pockmarked former counterterrorism officer from Shabak, Israel’s internal security service, who was now running agents in Syria and Lebanon. Then it was a pair of all-purpose field hands named Oded and Mordecai, followed by Rimona Stern, a former military intelligence officer who now dealt with issues related to Iran’s nuclear program. A Rubenesque woman with sandstone-colored hair, Rimona also happened to be Shamron’s niece. Gabriel had known her since she was a child. His fondest memories of Rimona were of a fearless young girl on a kick scooter careening down the steep drive of her famous uncle’s house.
Next there appeared in the doorway a petite, dark-haired woman named Dina Sarid. A human database, she could recite the time, place, perpetrators, and casualty toll of every act of terrorism committed against Israeli and Western targets, including the long list of atrocities carried out by the highly skilled murderers of Hezbollah. For many years, she focused her considerable analytic skills on Imad Mughniyah, Hezbollah’s military commander and high priest of terror. Indeed, thanks in large measure to Dina’s work, Mughniyah met his much-deserved end in Damascus in 2008 when a bomb exploded beneath his car. Dina marked Mughniyah’s demise by paying a visit to the graves of her mother and two of her sisters. They were killed on October 19, 1994, when a suicide bomber from Hamas, Iran’s other proxy, detonated himself on a Number 5 bus in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street. Dina was seriously wounded in the attack and still walked with a slight limp.
As usual, Mikhail Abramov arrived last. Lanky and fair with a fine-boned face and eyes the color of glacial ice, he had immigrated to Israel from Russia as a teenager and joined the Sayeret Matkal, the IDF’s elite special operations unit. Once described by Ari Shamron as “Gabriel without a conscience,” he had personally assassinated several of the top terror masterminds from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. He now carried out similar missions on behalf of the Office, though his enormous talents were not limited strictly to the gun.
Within the corridors and conference rooms of King Saul Boulevard, the nine men and women gathered in Room 456C were known by the code name “Barak”—the Hebrew word for lightning—for their ability to gather and strike quickly. They had fought together, often under conditions of unbearable stress, on secret battlefields stretching from Moscow to the Caribbean to the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia. Gabriel had been lucky to survive their last operation, but now he stood before them once again, looking none the worse for wear, holding them spellbound with a story. It featured a museum curator whose father had been a tomb robber, a priest with a dangerous secret, and a glorified mobster named Carlo Marchese who was doing business with the world’s most dangerous terrorist group. The goal of the operation, said Gabriel, would be simple. They were going to assemble a dossier that would destroy Carlo and in the process blow a hole in Hezbollah’s bottom line. But it wouldn’t be sufficient simply to prove that Carlo Marchese was a criminal. They were going to find the cordata, the rope, linking him directly to Hezbollah. And then they were going to wrap it around his neck.
They were a family of sorts, and like all families there were petty jealousies, unspoken resentments, and various other forms of sibling dysfunction. Even so, they managed to divide themselves into subunits and settle down to work with a minimum of bickering. Yossi, Chiara, and Mordecai saw to Carlo, while responsibility for Hezbollah’s criminal fund-raising networks fell to Dina, Rimona, Yaakov, and Mikhail. Gabriel and Eli Lavon floated somewhere in between, for it was their task to find the nexus between the two organizations—or, as Lavon put it, the wedding band that joined Carlo and Hezbollah in criminal matrimony.
Before long, the walls of Room 456C reflected the unique nature of their undertaking. On one side were the outlines of Carlo Marchese’s overt business empire; on the other, the known elements of Hezbollah, Inc. It had but one task—to supply a steady stream of money to the most dangerous terrorist group the world had ever known. It was Hezbollah, not al-Qaeda, that first turned human beings into bombs, and Hezbollah that first developed a truly global capability. Indeed, on two occasions, it was able to reach its tentacles across the Atlantic and attack targets in Buenos Aires—first in 1992, when it bombed the Israeli Embassy, killing twenty-nine people, and again in 1994, when it destroyed the AMIA Jewish community center, leaving another ninety-five dead. Hezbollah’s ranks were filled with several thousand highly trained terrorists, many hidden within the worldwide Lebanese diaspora, and its vast arsenal of weaponry included several Scuds, making it the on
ly terrorist group in the world to possess ballistic missiles. In short, Hezbollah had the ability to carry out a cataclysmic terrorist attack at the time and place of its choosing. All it required was the blessing of its Shiite clerical masters in Tehran.
It was Allah who provided Hezbollah’s inspiration, but mere mortals saw to its financial needs. Their faces scowled from Dina’s side of the room. At the center of the web she placed the Lebanon Byzantine Bank. Then, with the help of Unit 8200, she assembled a communication matrix and phone tree that stretched from Beirut to London to the lawless Tri-Border Area of South America. Lebanon Byzantine Bank—or LBB in the lexicon of the team—was the glue that held it all together. Thanks to the cybersleuths from Unit 8200, the team perused its ledger sheets at will. Indeed, Yaakov joked that he knew more about LBB’s operations and investments than even the bank’s president. It quickly became apparent that the institution—“And I do use that term loosely,” scoffed Yaakov—was little more than a front for Hezbollah. “Follow the money,” Gabriel instructed the team, “and with a bit of luck, it will lead us to Hezbollah’s man inside the network.”
For the most part, Gabriel spent those days putting himself through a crash course on the global trade in illicit antiquities—specifically, how glittering treasures from the past made their way from the dirty hands of tomb robbers and thieves onto the legitimate market. Much of the work involved a mind-numbing review of monographs, catalogues, museum databases, auction house records, and published inventories of antiquities dealers around the world. But occasionally he would head over to the Rockefeller Museum with Eli Lavon in tow to sit at the feet of a looting expert from the Israel Antiquities Authority. In addition, he phoned an old friend in the London art world who had a number of acquaintances who dabbled in what he liked to call “the naughty end of the trade.” Finally, he quietly renewed contact with General Ferrari, who immediately sent along copies of some of his most closely guarded files, despite the fact that Gabriel pointedly refused to identify his target. It was now an operation, and operational rules applied.
And so it went for twelve days and twelve seemingly endless nights, as each group labored to assemble its piece of the puzzle. Lavon, the biblical archaeologist, couldn’t help but compare the quest to the construction of the ancient underground aqueduct beneath the City of David that linked the Gihon Spring with the Pool of Siloam. More than seventeen hundred feet in length, it had been hastily carved out of the bedrock in the eighth century BC as the city prepared itself for a siege by the approaching Assyrian army. To speed the process, King Hezekiah ordered two separate teams to tunnel toward each other simultaneously. Somehow they managed to meet in the middle, and the life-saving water flowed into the city.
The team experienced a similar episode shortly after midnight on the thirteenth day, when Gabriel’s team took delivery of the nightly packet of material from Unit 8200. It included a list of all cash wire transfers that had flowed to and from the accounts of Lebanon Byzantine Bank that day. The document revealed that, at 4:17 p.m., LBB received a transfer of one and a half million euros from the Galleria Naxos of St. Moritz, Switzerland. Then, a few minutes after five o’clock Beirut time, a sum of one hundred and fifty thousand euros, ten percent of the original payment, was forwarded from LBB to an account at the Institute for Religious Works, otherwise known as the Vatican Bank. Eli Lavon would later describe the atmosphere in the room as a bit like the moment Hezekiah’s workmen first heard each other chiseling through the bedrock. Gabriel ordered his own teams to dig a little more, and by dawn they knew they had their man.
20
KING SAUL BOULEVARD, TEL AVIV
“HE CALLS HIMSELF DAVID GIRARD. But like almost everything else about him, it’s a lie.”
Gabriel dropped the file folder onto Uzi Navot’s preposterously large executive desk. It was fashioned of smoked glass and stood near the floor-to-ceiling bulletproof windows overlooking downtown Tel Aviv and the sea. Hazy sunlight filtered through the vertical blinds, imprisoning Navot in bars of shadow. He left the file untouched and with a wave of his hand invited Gabriel to elaborate.
“His real name is Daoud Ghandour. He was born in the village of Tayr Dibba in southern Lebanon, the same town as Imad Mughniyah, which means they probably knew each other when they were growing up.”
“How did he get from a shithole like Tayr Dibba to an antiquities gallery in St. Moritz?”
“The Lebanese way,” replied Gabriel. “In 1970, when Arafat and the PLO set up shop in southern Lebanon, the Ghandour family moved to Beirut. Apparently, Daoud was an exceptionally bright child. He went to a good school and learned to speak French and English. When it came time for him to attend university, he moved to Paris to study ancient history at the Sorbonne.”
“Is that when Daoud Ghandour became David Girard?”
“That wasn’t until he moved on to Oxford,” Gabriel answered. “After completing his PhD in classical archaeology, he went to work in the antiquities department of Sotheby’s in London. He was there in the late nineties when Sotheby’s was accused of selling unprovenanced antiquities. He left London under something of a cloud.”
“And went into business for himself?”
Gabriel nodded.
“How much does it cost to open a gallery in St. Moritz?”
“A lot.”
“Where did he get the money?”
“Good question.”
Gabriel removed a photograph from the file and dealt it across the desktop. It showed a slender figure in his late forties leaning against a glass display case filled with Greek and Etruscan pottery. He wore a dark pullover and a dark blazer. His gaze was soft and thoughtful. His posed smile managed to appear genuine.
“Handsome devil,” said Navot. “Where’d you get the photo?”
“From the Web site of the gallery. His official bio has a couple of glaring holes in it, such as his given name and place of birth.”
“What flavor passport is he carrying these days?”
“Swiss. He has a Swiss wife, too.”
“Which variety?”
“German speaker.”
“How cosmopolitan.” Navot frowned at the photograph. “What do we know about his travel habits?”
“Like most people in the antiquities trade, he spends a great deal of time on airplanes and in hotel rooms.”
“Lebanon?”
“He pops into Beirut at least twice a month.” Gabriel paused, then added, “He also spends a fair amount of time here in Israel.”
Navot looked up sharply but said nothing.
“According to Eli’s friends over at the Israel Antiquities Authority, Daoud Ghandour, aka David Girard, is a frequent visitor to the Temple Mount. Actually,” Gabriel corrected himself, “he spends most of his time under the Mount.”
“Doing what?”
“He’s an unpaid adviser to the Palestinian Authority and the Waqf on issues related to archaeological matters. By the way, that’s not in his official bio, either.”
Navot stared at the photo for a moment. “What’s your theory?”
“I think he’s Hezbollah’s man in Carlo’s network. He sells looted goods out of his gallery in St. Moritz, sends the profits back home through LBB, and gives a ten percent cut to his godfather Carlo Marchese.”
“Can you prove it?”
“Not yet. Which is why I’m proposing we go into business with him.”
“How?”
“I’m going to offer him something irresistible, and see if he bites.”
“I probably shouldn’t ask,” Navot sighed, “but just where do you intend to get something so irresistible?”
“I’m going to steal it, of course.”
“Of course,” said Navot, smiling. “Is there anything you need from me?”
“Money, Uzi. Lots of money.”
Office doctrine dictates that field agents departing for missions abroad spend their final night in Israel at a safe flat known as a jump site. There, free from the di
stractions of spouses, lovers, children, and pets, they assume the identities they will wear like body armor until they return home again. Only Gabriel and Eli Lavon chose not to participate in this enduring operational ritual, for by their own calculation, they had spent more time living under false names than their own.
As it turned out, both chose to pass at least part of that last evening in the company of damaged women. Lavon headed to the Western Wall Tunnel to spend a few hours with his beloved Rivka, while Gabriel made a pilgrimage to the Mount Herzl Psychiatric Hospital to see Leah. As usual, he arrived after normal visiting hours. Leah’s doctor was waiting in the lobby. A rabbinical-looking man with a kippah and a long gray beard, he was the only person in Israel not connected to the Office who knew precisely what had happened that night in Vienna.
“It’s been a while since your last visit.” The doctor gave a forgiving smile. “She’s looking forward to seeing you.”
“How is she?”
“The same. At this stage of her life, that’s the best we can hope for.”
The doctor took Gabriel by the arm and guided him along a corridor of Jerusalem limestone to a common room with windows overlooking the hospital’s garden. It was there, in the shade of a stone pine, that Gabriel had sought Leah’s permission to marry Chiara. The moment was only partially imprinted in Leah’s watery memory. At times, she seemed to realize that Gabriel was no longer her husband, but for the most part she remained a prisoner of the past. In Leah’s bewildered mind, there was nothing unusual about Gabriel’s long absences. Thanks to Shamron, he had always entered and departed her world with little or no warning.
She was seated in her wheelchair with the twisted remnants of her hands resting in her lap. Her hair, once long and dark like Chiara’s, was now cut institutional short and shot with gray. Gabriel kissed the cool, firm scar tissue of her cheek before lowering himself into the armless little chair the doctor had placed at her side. Leah seemed unaware of his presence. She was staring sightlessly into the darkened garden.