by Daniel Silva
32
KING SAUL BOULEVARD, TEL AVIV
THEY STARTED THEIR SEARCH NOT with the son but with the father: the man who had ruled Syria from 1970 until his death of a heart attack in 2000. He was born in the Ansariya Mountains of northwestern Syria in October 1930, in the village of Qurdaha. Like the other villages in the region, Qurdaha belonged to the Alawites, followers of a tiny, persecuted branch of Shia Islam whom the majority Sunnis regarded as heretics. Qurdaha had no mosque or church and not a single café or shop, but rain fell upon the land thirty days each year, and there was a mineral spring in a nearby cave that the villagers called ‘Ayn Zarqa. The ninth of eleven children, he lived in a two-room stone house with a small front yard of beaten earth and an adjoining mud patch for the animals. His grandfather, a minor village notable who was good with his fists and a gun, was known as al-Wahhish, the Wild Man, because he had once thrashed a traveling Turkish wrestler. His father could put a bullet through a cigarette paper at a hundred paces.
In 1944 he left Qurdaha to attend school in the coastal town of Latakia. There he became active in politics, joining the new Arab Baath Socialist Party, a secular movement that sought to end Western influence in the Middle East through pan-Arab socialism. In 1951 he enrolled in a military academy in Aleppo, a traditional route for an Alawite trying to escape the bonds of mountain poverty, and by 1964 he was in command of the Syrian air force. After a Baathist coup in 1966, he became Syria’s defense minister, a post he held during Syria’s disastrous war with Israel in 1967, when it lost the Golan Heights. Despite the catastrophic failure of his forces, he would be the president of Syria just three years later. In a sign of things to come, he referred to the bloodless coup that brought him to power as a “corrective movement.”
His rise ended a long cycle of political instability in Syria, but at a high cost to the Syrian people and the rest of the Middle East. A client of the Soviet Union, his regime was among the most dangerous in the region. He supported radical elements of the Palestinian movement—Abu Nidal operated with impunity from Damascus for years—and equipped his military with the latest in Soviet tanks, fighters, and air defenses. Syria itself became a vast prison, a place where fax machines were outlawed and a misplaced word about the ruler would result in a trip to the Mezzeh, the notorious hilltop prison in western Damascus. Fifteen separate security services spied on the Syrian people and on one another. All were controlled by Alawites, as was the Syrian military. An elaborate cult of personality rose around the ruler and his family. His face, with its domed forehead and sickly pallor, loomed over every square and hung on the walls of every public building in the country. His peasant mother was revered almost as a saint.
Within a decade of his ascent, however, much of the country’s Sunni majority was no longer content to be ruled over by an Alawite peasant from Qurdaha. Bombs exploded regularly in Damascus, and in June 1979 a member of the Muslim Brotherhood killed at least fifty Alawite cadets in the dining hall of the Aleppo military academy. A year later, Islamic militants hurled a pair of grenades at the ruler during a diplomatic function in Damascus—at which point the ruler’s hot-tempered brother declared all-out war on the Brotherhood and its Sunni Muslim supporters. Among his first acts was to dispatch units of his Defense Companies, the guardians of the regime, to the Palmyra desert prison. An estimated eight hundred political prisoners were slaughtered in their cells.
But it was in the town of Hama, a hotbed of Muslim Brotherhood activity along the banks of the Orontes River, that the regime showed the lengths to which it would go to ensure its survival. With the country teetering on the brink of civil war, the Defense Companies entered the city early on the morning of February 2, 1982, along with several hundred agents of the feared Mukhabarat secret police. What followed was the worst massacre in the history of the modern Middle East, a monthlong frenzy of killing, torture, and destruction that left at least twenty thousand people dead and a city reduced to rubble. The ruler never denied the massacre, nor did he quibble over the number of dead. In fact, he allowed the city to lie in ruins for months as a reminder of what would happen to those who dared to challenge him. In the Middle East, a new term came into vogue: Hama Rules.
The ruler never again faced a serious threat. Indeed, in a 1991 presidential plebiscite, he earned 99.9 percent of the vote, which prompted one Syrian commentator to note that even Allah would not have performed so well. He hired a famous architect to build him a lavish presidential palace, and as his health deteriorated he gave thought to a successor. The hotheaded younger brother attempted to seize power when the ruler was incapacitated with illness, and was cast into exile. The cherished eldest son, a soldier, a champion equestrian, died violently in an automobile accident. Which left only the soft-spoken middle son, a London-educated eye doctor, to assume control of the family business.
The first years of his rule were filled with hope and promise. He granted his fellow citizens access to the Internet and allowed them to travel outside the country without first securing the government’s permission. He dined in restaurants with his fashion-conscious wife and freed several hundred political prisoners. Luxury hotels and shopping malls altered the skyline of drab Damascus and Aleppo. Western cigarettes, banned by his father, appeared on Syrian store shelves.
Then came the great Arab Awakening. The Syrians remained on the sidelines as the old order crumbled around them, as if they had a premonition of what lay ahead. Then, in March 2011, fifteen young boys dared to spray anti-regime graffiti on the wall of a school in Daraa, a small farming town sixty miles south of Damascus. The Mukhabarat quickly took the boys into custody and advised their fathers to go home and produce new children, because they would never see their sons again. Daraa exploded into protests, which quickly spread to Homs, Hama, and, eventually, to Damascus. Within a year, Syria would be engulfed in a full-blown civil war. And the son, like his father before him, would play by Hama Rules.
But where was the money? The money that had been looted from the Syrian treasury for two generations. The money that had been skimmed from state-owned Syrian enterprises and funneled into the pockets of the ruler and his Alawite kin from Qurdaha. A portion of it was hidden within a company called LXR Investments of Luxembourg, and it was there Gabriel and the team made their initial inquiries. They were polite at first and, consequently, wholly unsatisfactory. A simple search of the Internet revealed that LXR had no public Web site and had appeared in no news stories or public relations releases, business-related or otherwise. There was a short entry in the Luxembourg commercial registry, but it contained no names of LXR investors or management—only an address, which turned out to be the premises of a corporation lawyer. It was obvious to Eli Lavon, the team’s most experienced financial investigator, that LXR was a classic instrument used by someone who wished to invest his money anonymously. It was a cipher, a ghost company, a shell within a shell.
They broadened their search to commercial registries in Western Europe. And when that failed to produce more than a weak blip on their radar screens, they scoured tax and real estate records in every country where such documents were available. None of the searches produced any matches except in the United Kingdom, where they learned that LXR Investments was the leaseholder of record for a retail building on King’s Road in Chelsea, currently occupied by a well-known women’s clothing company. The lawyer representing LXR in Britain worked for a small law firm based in Southwark, London. His name was Hamid Khaddam. He was born in November 1964, in the town of Qurdaha, Syria.
He lived in a cottage in the Tower Hamlets section of London with his Baghdad-born wife, Aisha, and three teenage daughters who were far too westernized for his tastes. He traveled to work each morning by Tube, though on occasion, when it was raining or if he was running late, he would grant himself the small luxury of a taxi. The law firm’s offices were located in a small brick building on Great Suffolk Street, a long way from the tony addresses of Knightsbridge and Mayfair. There were eight lawyers in
all—four Syrians, two Iraqis, an Egyptian, and a flashy young Jordanian who claimed blood links to his country’s Hashemite rulers. Hamid Khaddam was the only Alawite. He had a television in his office, which was tuned always to Al Jazeera. He obtained most of his news, however, by reading Arabic-language blogs from the Middle East. All tilted editorially in favor of the regime.
He was careful in his personal and professional life, though not careful enough to realize he was the target of an intelligence assault that was as far-reaching as it was quiet. It began the morning after the team learned his name, when Mordecai and Oded parachuted into London with Canadian passports in their pockets and suitcases filled with the carefully disguised tools of their trade. For two days they watched him from a distance. Then, on the morning of the third, the nimble-fingered Mordecai was able to briefly acquire Khaddam’s mobile phone while he was riding a Central Line train between Mile End and Liverpool Street. The software Mordecai inserted into the device’s operating system gave the team real-time access to Khaddam’s e-mails, text messages, contacts, photos, and voice calls. It also turned the device into a full-time transmitter, which meant that everywhere Hamid Khaddam went, the team went with him. What’s more, they were granted entrée into the computer network of the law firm and Hamid Khaddam’s personal desktop at home. It was, said Eli Lavon, the gift that kept on giving.
The data flowed from Khaddam’s phone to a computer inside London Station, and from London Station it moved securely to Gabriel’s Lair in the depths of King Saul Boulevard. There the team pulled it apart, phone number by phone number, e-mail address by e-mail address, name by name. LXR Investments appeared in an e-mail to a Syrian lawyer in Paris, and a second e-mail sent to an accountant in Brussels. The team pursued both lines of inquiry, but the thread frayed long before it reached Damascus. Indeed, they found nothing in the trove of material to suggest Khaddam was in contact with any elements of the Syrian regime or the extended ruling family. He was a spear-carrier, declared Lavon, a runner of financial errands directed by higher authority. In fact, he said, it was possible the lowly Syrian lawyer from London didn’t even realize who he was working for.
And so they burrowed and sifted and argued among themselves while all around them the rest of King Saul Boulevard watched and waited in anticipation. The rules of compartmentalization meant that only a handful of senior officers knew the nature of their work, but the flow of files from Research to Room 456C clearly illuminated the path they were following. It did not take long for word to spread that Gabriel was back in the building. Nor was it a secret that Bella Navot, bride of his vanquished rival, was working faithfully at his side. Rumors flourished. Rumors that Navot was planning to hand over the reins to Gabriel before his term had ended. Rumors that Gabriel and the prime minister were actually trying to hasten Navot’s departure. There was even a rumor that Bella was planning to divorce her husband once he had been stripped of the trappings of power. They were all put to rest one afternoon when Gabriel and the Navots were seen lunching pleasantly in the executive dining room. Navot was eating poached fish and steamed vegetables, a sign he was once again adhering to Bella’s draconian dietary restrictions. Surely, said the rumors, he would not submit to the will of a woman who was planning to leave him.
But there was no denying the fact that the Office had stirred to life in the days since Gabriel’s return. It was as if the entire building was dusting off the cobwebs after a long operational slumber. There was a sense of an imminent strike, even if the troops had no idea where the strike would take place or what form it would take. Even Bella seemed caught up in the change that had come over her husband’s service. Her appearance changed markedly. She traded her Fortune 500 suits for jeans and a sweatshirt, and started wearing her hair in a messy undergraduate ponytail. It was the way Gabriel would always think of her, the intense young analyst in sandals and a wrinkled shirt, toiling at her desk long after everyone else had gone home for the night. There was a reason Bella was regarded as the country’s top expert on Syria; she worked harder than anyone else and didn’t need things like food or sleep. She was also ruthless in her desire to succeed, be it in the academic arena or within the walls of King Saul Boulevard. Gabriel always wondered whether a bit of the Baathists had rubbed off on her over the years. Bella was a natural killer.
Her reputation preceded her, of course, so it was understandable the team kept a polite distance at first. But gradually their walls came down, and within a few days they were treating her as though she had been there with them from the beginning. When the team commenced one of its legendary quarrels, Bella was invariably on the winning side. And when they gathered at night for their traditional family dinner, Bella left her husband to his own devices and joined them. It was their custom to avoid talking about the case over meals, and so they debated Israel’s place in the changing Arab world instead. Like the great powers of the West, Israel had always preferred the Arab strongman to the Arab street. It had never made peace with an Arab democrat, only dictators and potentates. For many decades, the strongmen had provided a modicum of regional stability, but at a terrible cost to the people who lived beneath their thumbs. The numbers did not lie, and Bella, a scholar of the region’s cruelest regime, could recite them by rote. Despite massive oil wealth, one-fifth of the Arab world survived on less than two dollars a day. Sixty-five million Arabs, the majority of them women, could not read or write, and millions received no schooling at all. The Arabs, once pioneers in the fields of mathematics and geometry, had fallen woefully behind the developed world in scientific and technological research. During the past millennium, the Arabs had translated fewer books than Spain translated in a single year. In many parts of the Arab world, the Koran was the only book that mattered.
But how, asked Bella, had it come to this? Radical Islam had surely played its role, but so had money. Money that the dictators and potentates spent on themselves rather than on their people. Money that flowed out of the Arab world and into the private banks of Geneva, Zurich, and Liechtenstein. Money that Gabriel and the team were desperately trying to find. As the days dragged on, they hit brick walls, dead ends, dry holes, and doors they could not open. And they read the e-mail of a lowly London lawyer named Hamid Khaddam and listened carefully as he went about his day: the Tube rides, the meetings with clients on matters large and small, the petty disagreements with his pan-Arab partners. And they listened, too, as he returned each evening to the cottage in Tower Hamlets where he lived in the company of four women. On one such evening, he had a torrid argument with his eldest daughter over the length of a skirt she was planning to wear to a party where boys would be present. Like the young girl, the team was grateful for the interruption of his mobile phone. The conversation was two minutes and eighteen seconds in length. And when it was over, Gabriel and his team knew they had finally found the man they were looking for.
33
LINZ, AUSTRIA
ONE HUNDRED MILES WEST OF Vienna, the river Danube bends abruptly from the northwest to the southeast. The ancient Romans installed a garrison on the spot; and when the Romans were gone, the people who would one day be known as Austrians built a city they called Linz. The city grew rich from the iron ore and salt that moved along the river, and for a time it was the most important in the Austro-Hungarian Empire—more important, even, than Vienna. Mozart composed his Symphony no. 36 while living in Linz; Anton Bruckner served as the organist in the Old Cathedral. And in the small suburb of Leonding, at Michaels-bergstrasse 16, there stands a yellow house where Adolf Hitler lived as a child. Hitler moved to Vienna in 1905 in hopes of winning admission to the Academy of Fine Arts, but his beloved Linz would never be far from his thoughts. Linz was to be the cultural center of the Thousand-Year Reich, and it was there that Hitler planned to build his monumental Führermuseum of plundered art. Indeed, the very code name of his looting operation was Sonderauftrag Linz, or Special Operation Linz. Modern Linz had worked hard to conceal its links to Hitler, but reminders of the
past were everywhere. The city’s most prominent firm, the steel giant Voestalpine AG, was originally known as the Hermann-Göring-Werke. And twelve miles east of the city center were the remnants of Mauthausen, the Nazi camp where inmates were subjected to “extermination through labor.” Among those prisoners who lived to see the camp liberated was Simon Wiesenthal, who would later become the world’s most famous Nazi hunter.
The man who came to Linz on the first Tuesday of June knew much about the city’s dark past. In fact, for a period of his many-faceted life, it had been his primary obsession. As he stepped lightly from his train at the Hauptbahnhof, he wore a dark suit that suggested he possessed substantial wealth, and a gold wristwatch that left the impression he had not come by it altogether honestly, which happened to be true. He had traveled to Linz from Vienna, and before that he had been in Munich, Budapest, and Prague. Twice along his journey he had changed identities. For now, he was Feliks Adler, a Middle European of uncertain national origin, a lover of many women, a fighter of forgotten wars, a man who was more comfortable in Gstaad and Saint-Tropez than he was in his hometown, wherever that had been. His real name, however, was Eli Lavon.
From the station he walked along a street lined with cream-colored apartment houses, until he came to the New Cathedral, Austria’s largest church. By edict, its soaring spire was ten feet shorter than that of its counterpart in Vienna, the mighty Stephansdom. Lavon went inside to see whether anyone from the street would follow him. And as he walked beneath the soaring nave, he wondered, not for the first time, how such a devoutly Roman Catholic land could have played such an outsize role in the murder of six million. It was in their bones, he thought. They drank it with their mother’s milk.
