The Fallen Angel ga-12

by Daniel Silva

  Lavon had been expecting a Talmudic debate on why such a step was necessary, or even whether it was possible on the Sabbath. Instead, he watched in wonder as the congregants rose to their feet and followed his instructions to the letter. In his earpiece, he could hear a voice in German saying the four Hezbollah operatives had just changed onto a Number 3 U-Bahn train bound for the Innere Stadt. He looked at his watch. The time was 6:05. They were right on schedule.

  At the far end of the Rotenturmstrasse, just a few paces from the banks of the Donaukanal, is a café called Aida. The awning that shades its tables is Miami pink, as is the exterior of the building, making it, arguably, the ugliest café in all of Vienna. In another lifetime, under another name, Gabriel had brought his son to Aida most afternoons for chocolate gelato. Now he sat there with Mikhail Abramov. Four members of EKO Cobra were huddled around a nearby table, as inconspicuous as a Times Square billboard. Gabriel had his back turned to the street, the weight of the .45-caliber Beretta tugging at his shoulder. Mikhail was drumming his fingers nervously on the tabletop.

  “How long do you intend to do that?” asked Gabriel.

  “Until I see those four boys from Hezbollah.”

  “It’s giving me a headache.”

  “You’ll live.” Mikhail’s fingers went still. “I wish we didn’t have to let him go.”

  “Massoud?”

  Mikhail nodded.

  “I gave him my word.”

  “He’s a murderer.”

  “But I’m not,” said Gabriel. “And neither are you.”

  “What if he wasn’t telling you the truth? Then you wouldn’t have to live up to your end of the bargain.”

  “If four suicide bombers from Hezbollah come walking up that street in a few minutes,” Gabriel said, nodding toward the window, “we’ll know he was telling us the truth.”

  Mikhail started drumming his fingers again. “Maybe we don’t actually have to kill him,” he said philosophically. “Maybe we could just . . . forget him.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that Yossi and the others could just drive away from that house in Denmark with Massoud still chained to the wall. Eventually, someone would find his skeleton.”

  “A dishonest mistake? Is that what you’re suggesting?”

  “Shit happens.”

  “It would still be murder.”

  “No, it wouldn’t. It would be death by negligence.”

  “I’m afraid that’s a distinction without a difference.”

  “Exactly.” Mikhail opened his mouth to continue, but he could see Gabriel was listening to the radio.

  “What is it?”

  “They’re getting off the train.”

  “Where?”

  “The Stephansplatz.”

  “Right where Massoud said they would.”

  Gabriel nodded.

  “I still think we should kill him.”

  “You mean forget him.”

  “That, too.”

  “We’re not murderers, Mikhail. We are preventers of murder.”

  “Let’s hope so. Otherwise, they’re going to have to pick us off the street with tweezers.”

  “It’s better to think positive thoughts.”

  “I’ve always preferred to dwell upon the worst-case scenario.”

  “Why?”

  “Motivation,” said Mikhail. “If I imagine a rabbi soaking up my blood for burial, it will motivate me to do my job properly.”

  “Just wait until the guns appear. We can’t kill them until we see the guns.”

  “What if they don’t draw their guns? What if they just detonate themselves in the street?”

  “Positive thoughts, Mikhail.”

  “I’m a Jew from Russia. Positive thoughts aren’t in my nature.”

  The waitress placed a check on the table. Gabriel gave her a twenty and told her to keep the change. Mikhail glanced at the four EKO Cobra men.

  “They look more nervous than we do.”

  “They probably are.”

  Mikhail turned his gaze to the street. “Have you given any thought to what you’re going to do next?”

  “I’m going to sleep for several days.”

  “Make sure you turn the phone off.”

  “This is the last time, Mikhail.”

  “Until some terrorist comes along who decides he wants to reduce the world’s population of Jews by a few hundred. Then we’ll be right back here again.”

  “I’m afraid you’re going to have to do it without me next time.”

  “We’ll see.” Mikhail looked at Gabriel. “Are you really sure you’re up for this?”

  “If you ask me that one more time, I’m going to shoot you.”

  “That would be a very bad idea.”

  “Why?”

  “Look out the window.”

  In the crisis center of the Austrian Interior Ministry, Ari Shamron stared at the video monitors, watching intently as the four Hezbollah terrorists turned into the narrow cobbled alley leading to the synagogue, followed by Gabriel and Mikhail. And at that moment, he had a chillingly clear premonition of disaster unlike any he had ever experienced before. It was nothing, he assured himself. The Stadttempel had survived Kristallnacht; it would survive this night, too. He ignited the Zippo lighter and stared at the jewel-like flame. Two seconds, he thought, maybe less. Then it would be done.

  They had arranged themselves in a boxlike formation, with two in front and the other two trailing a few steps behind. Gabriel couldn’t help but admire their tradecraft. With their winter coats and false casual demeanor, they looked like four young men out for an evening in Vienna’s famed Bermuda Triangle—anything but four Hezbollah suicide bombers who were minutes from death. Gabriel knew a great deal about them. He knew each of their names, the villages where they had been born, and the circumstances of their recruitments. For now, though, they were simply Alef, Bet, Gimel, and Dalet—the first four letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Alef and Bet belonged to Gabriel; Gimel and Dalet, to Mikhail. Alef, Bet, Gimel, Dalet . . . Then it would be done.

  The street rose at a pitched angle and curved slightly to the right. After a few more paces, Gabriel could see Yaakov and Oded standing in a pool of white light outside the synagogue’s entrance. Oded was cross-examining a pair of American Jews who wished to attend Shabbat services in the city of their ancestry, but Yaakov was watching the four young men coming toward him up the street. He stared at them for an appropriate interval before forcing himself to look away. Oded seemed not to notice them. Having admitted the two Americans, he was now working his way through the rest of the small line of congregants waiting to enter. A dozen more, including a pair of young children, stood in the street, unaware of the horror that was approaching.

  From the moment Gabriel and Mikhail had left the café, they had been gradually closing the distance between themselves and their targets. Twenty-five feet now separated them—four terrorists, two secret soldiers, each committed to his mission, each certain of his cause and his God. Tonight the ancient war for control of the Land of Israel would once again be played out on a pretty Viennese street. Gabriel couldn’t help but feel the weight of history pressing down upon his shoulders as he climbed the sloping cobbles—his own history, the history of his people, Shamron . . . He imagined Shamron in his youth stalking Adolf Eichmann along a desolate lane north of Buenos Aires. Shamron had tripped over a loose shoelace that night and nearly fallen. After that, he had always double-knotted his laces whenever he went into the field. Gabriel had done the same tonight in Shamron’s honor. No loose shoelaces. No nightmare of blood and fire at a synagogue in Vienna.

  Gabriel and Mikhail quickened their pace slightly, closing the gap further still. As the terrorists passed through a cone of lamplight, Gabriel noticed the wire of a detonator switch running along the inside of Alef’s wrist. All four of the terrorists wore their overcoats tightly buttoned, and, not coincidentally, all four had their right hands in their pockets. That’s
where the guns would be. Draw them, thought Gabriel. Two seconds, maybe less. Alef, Bet, Gimel, Dalet . . . Then it would be done.

  Gabriel quickly glanced over his shoulder and saw the EKO Cobra team trailing quietly behind. Yaakov and Oded had managed to usher most of the crowd inside, but a few congregants were still milling about in the street, including the two young children. Mikhail drew several long, heavy breaths in an attempt to slow his racing heart, but Gabriel didn’t bother. It wouldn’t be possible. Not tonight. And so he stared at Alef’s right hand, his heart beating in his chest like a kettledrum, and waited for the gun to emerge. In the end, though, it was one of the children, a young boy, who saw it first. His scream of terror set fire to the back of Gabriel’s neck.

  There would be no explosion.

  There would be no funeral for a child.

  Just a pair of fallen angels rushing forward with their arms extended.

  Two seconds, maybe less.

  Alef, Bet, Gimel, Dalet . . .

  Then it was done.

  Chiara never heard the gunshots, only the sirens. Alone in her room, she thought it was the most beautiful sound she had ever heard. She listened for several minutes, then snatched up her mobile phone and dialed Uzi Navot at the Interior Ministry. She could barely hear his voice over the background noise.

  “What’s going on?”

  “It’s over,” he said.

  “Was anyone else hurt?”

  “Only the bad guys.”

  “Where is he?”

  “The Austrians have him.”

  “I want him back.”

  “Don’t worry,” Navot said. “He’s all yours now.”

  36

  VIENNA–TEL AVIV–VATICAN CITY

  LIKE MOST LIES, IT WAS not altogether convincing. Shamron found no fault in this; in fact, he wholeheartedly approved. Lying, he said, was a distinctly human endeavor, even when it was being done by professionals. And a lie that was too well told was one not easily believed.

  Initially, there was confusion over precisely what had occurred at sunset in the narrow street outside the Stadttempel. The first bulletins on Austrian radio reported that a pair of gunmen had killed four Jewish men outside the synagogue in what appeared to be an act of right-wing extremist violence. The situation was muddied further when an obscure neo-Nazi group proudly claimed responsibility for the deed. Jonas Kessler’s first instinct was to quickly correct the story. But Shamron and Uzi Navot prevailed upon him to let it linger until nine that evening, when he finally appeared in the Interior Ministry’s press briefing room to reveal the truth—or at least the truth as he saw it. Yes, Kessler began, there had indeed been a shooting at the synagogue, but the four dead were suicide bombers from Hezbollah who had come to Vienna to carry out a murderous terrorist attack. The Austrian authorities, he said, had been alerted to the presence of the cell in Vienna by a foreign intelligence service that Kessler, for understandable reasons, could not identify. As for the successful operation outside the synagogue, it was a strictly Austrian affair carried out by the EKO Cobra division of the Federal Police. It was, Kessler concluded with admirable sincerity, “EKO Cobra’s finest hour.”

  Naturally, the press was drawn to the one aspect of the story where Kessler had been most evasive—the source of the intelligence that had led to the successful operation. Kessler and the rest of the Austrian security establishment held fast to their refusal to comment, but within forty-eight hours, numerous unnamed “intelligence sources” were quietly giving credit to the CIA. Once again, the television terrorism analysts questioned the accuracy of the reports, saying it was far more likely that the information had come from Israel. On the record, the Israelis refused to comment. Privately, however, they swore it wasn’t true.

  The matter did not die there. In fact, it took on new life the very next morning when Die Presse, one of Austria’s most respected papers, published a detailed account of the operation, based in large part on eyewitness testimony. The most intriguing aspect of the story was the description of the smaller of the two gunmen. And then there was the unkempt figure who had overseen the evacuation of the interior of the synagogue in the minutes preceding the attack. There were some who thought he bore an uncanny resemblance to a man who used to run a small Holocaust restitution agency in Vienna called Wartime Claims and Inquiries. An Israeli newspaper immediately reported that the man in question—Professor Eli Lavon of Hebrew University—was working on a dig near the Western Wall Tunnel at the time and that he had no known links to Israeli intelligence, neither of which was true.

  Needless to say, much of the Islamic world was soon boiling over with a sacred rage directed at Israel, its intelligence service, and, by extension, their new friends the Austrians. Newspapers across the Middle East declared the killings a wanton act of murder and challenged the Austrians to produce the bomb vests allegedly worn by the four “martyrs.” When Kessler did just that, the Arab press declared the vests fraudulent. And when Kessler released carefully edited photographs of the bodies that clearly showed the four men laden with bombs, the Arab world declared those fraudulent, too. It saw the hidden hand of Israel in the killings, and for once it was absolutely and entirely correct.

  It was against this unsettled backdrop that Massoud Rahimi, Iran’s kidnapped diplomat, was found wandering handcuffed and blindfolded in a pasture in the far north of Germany. He told the German police that he had escaped from his captors, but in a statement, the Iranian Liberation Army said they had released Massoud for “humanitarian reasons.” The next morning, looking a few pounds thinner but otherwise in good health, Massoud appeared before the cameras in Tehran, flanked by the Iranian president and the chief of his service. Massoud offered few details about his time in captivity, except to say that, in general terms, he was well treated. His chief appeared somewhat skeptical, as did the Iranian president, who vowed that those behind the kidnapping would be severely punished.

  The threat of Iranian retaliation was not taken lightly, especially within the corridors of King Saul Boulevard. For the most part, though, the Office celebrated the success of the operation. Lives had been saved, an old adversary had been severely compromised, and a lucrative fund-raising network for Hezbollah lay in ruins. If there was one factor that diminished their mood, however, it was the fact that His Holiness Pope Paul VII was scheduled to land at Ben Gurion Airport in less than a week. Given the overall turbulence in the region, Uzi Navot thought it might be wise for the Vatican to consider postponing the trip, a sentiment shared by the prime minister and the rest of his fractious cabinet. But who was going to tell the pope not to come to the Holy Land? They had but one candidate. A fallen angel in black. A sinner in the city of saints.

  Father Mark was waiting for Gabriel just inside the Bronze Doors. He escorted him up the steps of the Scala Regia, across the cobblestones of the Cortile di San Damaso, and, eventually, upstairs to the private apartments of the pope. Donati was seated behind the desk in his office. It was a simple, high-ceilinged room with whitewashed walls and shelves lined with books on canon law. Framed photographs stood in neat rows atop the credenza. Most showed Donati standing discreetly at the side of his master at historic moments of the papacy. One photo, however, seemed curiously out of place—a younger version of Donati, soiled and smiling without reservation, his arm flung across the shoulder of a bookish young priest.

  “That’s Father José Martinez,” Donati explained. “We’d just finished building a schoolhouse in our village in El Salvador. It was taken a week before his murder.” He studied Gabriel’s face for a moment and then frowned. “You look the way I did when I came out of El Salvador one step ahead of the death squads.”

  “It’s been a busy few weeks since I left Rome.”

  “So I’ve been reading,” Donati said. “An art theft in France, an explosion at a gallery in St. Moritz, a kidnapped Iranian diplomat, and a dramatic counterterrorism operation in the heart of Vienna. To the uninitiated, these events might appear unrelated. But
to someone like me, they appear to have one thing in common.”

  “Two things, actually,” said Gabriel. “One is the Office. And the other is Carlo Marchese.”

  It was approaching six o’clock, and the sun was dipping below the rooftops and domes of Rome’s historic center. As Gabriel spoke, the soft sienna light drained slowly from the office until it was cloaked in a confessional gloom. Dressed in his black cassock, Donati might have been invisible were it not for the ember of his cigarette. At the conclusion of Gabriel’s account, he sat for several minutes in a penitential silence before walking over to the window. Directly below was the Bastion of Nicholas V, the medieval tower that now served as headquarters of the Vatican Bank.

  “Can you prove any of it?”

  “There’s the kind of proof that will stand up in a court of law. And then there’s the kind of proof that’s good enough to make a problem go away.”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “A conversation,” answered Gabriel. “I’ll tell Carlo everything I know. And then I’ll tell him that you and His Holiness would like him to resign his position on the supervisory council of the Vatican Bank effective immediately. I’ll also tell him that if he ever darkens the Bronze Doors again, he’ll have to answer to me.”

  “It seems an awfully small price to pay for two murders.”

  “But it’s what you wanted.” Gabriel looked at Donati’s silhouette in the window. “It is what you wanted, isn’t it, Luigi?”

  “The moral thing to do would be to tell General Ferrari everything you know.”

  “Perhaps. But if the Italian government brings charges against Carlo for dealing in looted antiquities, money laundering, and murder, it will be a public-relations disaster for the Church. And for you, Luigi. Everything will come out. You’ll be destroyed.” Gabriel paused, then added, “And so will Veronica.”

  “And if Carlo refuses to leave quietly?”

  “I’ll make it clear he doesn’t have a choice. Trust me,” Gabriel added, “he’ll get the message.”