by Daniel Silva
“What’s that?”
“Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.”
“Did you and Estermann ever discuss religion?”
“Endlessly. Especially after the attack on the Vatican. He’s a devout Catholic.”
“And you?”
“I’m from Nidwalden. I was raised in a Catholic home, I married a Catholic girl in a ceremony officiated by the Church, and all three of our children were baptized.”
“But?”
“I haven’t been to Mass since the sexual abuse scandal broke.”
“Do you follow the teachings of the Vatican?”
“Why should I follow them if they don’t?”
“I assume Estermann disagreed with you.”
Bittel nodded. “He’s a lay member of an extremely conservative order based here in Switzerland.”
“The Order of St. Helena.”
Bittel’s eyes narrowed. “How did you know?”
Gabriel demurred. “I assume Estermann wanted you to join.”
“He was like an evangelist. He said I could be a secret member, that no one would know other than his bishop. He also said there were lots of people like us in the Order.”
“Us?”
“Intelligence officers and security types. Prominent businessmen and politicians, too. He said joining the Order would do wonders for my post-NDB career.”
“How did you handle it?”
“I told him I wasn’t interested and changed the subject.”
“When was the last time you spoke to him?”
“It’s been five years, at least. Probably more like six.”
“What was the occasion?”
“Estermann’s retirement from the Bf V. He wanted to give me his new contact information. Apparently, he struck gold. He’s working for a big German firm based in Munich.”
“The Wolf Group?”
“How did—”
“Lucky guess,” said Gabriel.
“Estermann told me to call him when I was ready to leave the NDB. There’s a Wolf Group office here in Zurich. He said he would make it worth my while.”
“You don’t happen to have his cell number, do you?”
“Sure. Why?”
“I’d like you to take him up on his offer. Tell him you’re going to be in Munich on Wednesday evening. Tell him you want to talk about your future.”
“But I can’t possibly go to Munich on Wednesday.”
“He doesn’t need to know that.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“Drinks. Somewhere quiet.”
“I told you, he doesn’t drink. He’s a Diet Coke man. Always a Diet Coke.” Bittel tapped the tabletop thoughtfully. “There’s a place in the Beethovenplatz called Café Adagio. Very chic. Discreet, too. The question is, what’s going to happen when he gets there?”
“I’m going to ask him a few questions.”
“About what?”
“The Order of St. Helena.”
“Why are you interested in the Order?”
“They murdered a friend of mine.”
“Who’s the friend?”
“His Holiness Pope Paul the Seventh.”
Bittel’s expression betrayed no sentiment, least of all surprise. “Now I know why you wanted me to keep an eye on the Hoffmann woman.”
“Send the message, Bittel.”
His thumbs hovered over his phone. “Do you know what will happen if I’m linked to this in any way?”
“The Office will lose a valuable partner. And I’ll lose a friend.”
“I’m not sure I want to be your friend, Allon. They all seem to end up dead.” Bittel typed the message and tapped SEND. Five long minutes elapsed before his phone pinged with a response. “You’re on. Six o’clock Wednesday evening at Café Adagio. Estermann’s looking forward to it.”
Gabriel gazed at the black waters of the lake. “That makes two of us.”
36
MUNICH
EXCEPT FOR A FEW DAYS in September 1972, Munich had never mattered much to the Office. Nevertheless, if only for sentimental reasons, Housekeeping maintained a large walled villa in the bohemian quarter of Schwabing, not far from the Englischer Garten. Eli Lavon arrived there at ten fifteen the following morning. Gloomily, he surveyed the heavy antique furnishings in the formal drawing room.
“I can’t believe we’re back here again.” He looked at Gabriel and frowned. “You’re supposed to be on holiday.”
“Yes, I know.”
“What happened?”
“A death in the family.”
“My condolences.”
Lavon tossed his overnight bag carelessly onto a couch. He had wispy, unkempt hair and a bland, forgettable face that even the most gifted portrait artist would have struggled to capture in oil on canvas. He appeared to be one of life’s downtrodden. In truth, he was a natural predator who could follow a highly trained intelligence officer or hardened terrorist down any street in the world without attracting a flicker of interest. He was now the chief of the Office division known as Neviot. Its operatives included surveillance artists, pickpockets, thieves, and those who specialized in planting hidden cameras and listening devices behind locked doors.
“I saw an interesting photo of you the other day. You were dressed as a priest and walking into the Vatican Secret Archives with your friend Luigi Donati. I was only sorry I couldn’t join you.” Lavon smiled. “Find anything interesting?”
“You might say that.”
Lavon raised a tiny hand. “Do tell.”
“We should probably wait until the others arrive.”
“They’re on their way. All of them.” Lavon’s lighter flared. “I assume this has something to do with the unfortunate passing of His Holiness Pope Paul the Seventh.”
Gabriel nodded.
“I take it His Holiness did not die of natural causes.”
“No,” said Gabriel. “He did not.”
“Do we have a suspect?”
“A Catholic order based in Canton Zug.”
Lavon stared at Gabriel through a cloud of smoke. “The Order of St. Helena?”
“You’ve heard of them?”
“Unfortunately, I dealt with the Order in a previous life.”
During a lengthy hiatus from the Office, Lavon had run a small investigative agency in Vienna called Wartime Claims and Inquiries. Operating on a shoestring budget, he had tracked down millions of dollars’ worth of looted Holocaust assets. He left Vienna after a bomb destroyed his office and killed two of his employees, both young women. The perpetrator, a former SS officer named Erich Radek, had died in an Israeli prison cell. Gabriel was the one who put him there.
“It was a case involving a Viennese family named Feldman,” explained Lavon. “The patriarch was Samuel Feldman, a well-to-do exporter of high-quality textiles. In the autumn of 1937, as storm clouds were gathering over Austria, two priests from the Order came calling on Feldman at his apartment in the First District. One of the priests was the Order’s founder, Father Ulrich Schiller.”
“And what did Father Schiller want from Samuel Feldman?”
“Money. What else?”
“What was he offering in return?”
“Baptismal certificates. Feldman was desperate, so he gave Father Schiller a substantial sum of cash and other valuables, including several paintings.”
“And when the Nazis rolled into Vienna in March 1938?”
“Father Schiller and the promised baptismal certificates were nowhere to be found. Feldman and most of his family were deported to the Lublin district of Poland, where they were murdered by Einsatzgruppen. One child survived the war in hiding in Vienna, a daughter named Isabel. She came to me after the Swiss banking scandal broke and told me the story.”
“What did you do?”
“I made an appointment to see Bishop Hans Richter, the superior general of the Order of St. Helena. We met at its medieval priory in Menzingen. A nasty piece of work, the bishop. There were moments when I had to remind
myself that I was actually speaking to a Roman Catholic cleric. Needless to say, I left empty-handed.”
“Did you let it drop?”
“Me? Of course not. And within a year, I found four other cases of the Order soliciting donations from Jews in exchange for promises of protection. Bishop Richter wouldn’t see me again, so I turned over my material to an Italian investigative reporter named Alessandro Ricci. He found a few more cases, including a wealthy Roman Jew who gave the Order several paintings and valuable rare books in 1938. I’m afraid his name escapes me.”
“Emanuele Giordano.”
Lavon eyed Gabriel over the ember of his cigarette. “How is it possible you know that name?”
“I met with Alessandro Ricci last night in Rome. He told me the Order of St. Helena is planning to steal the conclave and elect one of their members the next pope.”
“Knowing the Order, I’m sure it involves money.”
“It does.”
“Is that why they killed the pope?”
“No,” said Gabriel. “They killed him because he wanted to give me a book.”
“What kind of book?”
“Do you remember when we found the ruins of Solomon’s Temple?”
Lavon absently rubbed his chest. “How could I forget?”
Gabriel smiled. “This is better.”
THE OFFICE, LIKE THE Roman Catholic Church, was guided by ancient doctrine and dogma. Sacred and inviolable, it dictated that members of a large operational team travel to their destination by different routes. The exigencies of the situation, however, required all eight members of the team to journey to Munich on the same El Al flight. Nevertheless, they staggered their arrival at the safe house, if only to avoid attracting unwanted attention from the neighbors.
The first to arrive was Yossi Gavish, the tweedy, British-born head of Research. He was followed by Mordecai and Oded, a pair of all-purpose field hands, and a kid named Ilan who knew how to make the computers work. Next came Yaakov Rossman and Dina Sarid. Yaakov was the head of Special Ops. Dina was a human database of Palestinian and Islamic terrorism who possessed an uncanny knack for spotting connections others missed. Both spoke fluent German.
Mikhail Abramov wandered in around noon. Tall and lanky, with pale bloodless skin and eyes like glacial ice, he had immigrated to Israel from Russia as a teenager and joined the Sayeret Matkal, the IDF’s elite special operations unit. Often described as Gabriel without a conscience, he had personally assassinated several top terror masterminds from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. He now carried out similar assignments on behalf of the Office, though his extraordinary talents were not limited to the gun. A year earlier he had led a team into Tehran and stolen Iran’s entire nuclear archives.
He was accompanied by Natalie Mizrahi, who also happened to be his wife. Born and educated in France, fluent in the Algerian dialect of Arabic, she had traded a promising medical career for the dangerous life of an undercover Office field agent. Her first assignment took her to Raqqa, the capital of the short-lived caliphate of the Islamic State, where she penetrated ISIS’s external terrorism network. Were it not for Gabriel and Mikhail, the operation would have been her last.
Like the other members of the team, Natalie had only the vaguest idea why she had been ordered to Munich. Now, in the half-light of the formal drawing room, she listened intently as Gabriel told the team the story of a well-deserved family vacation that was not to be. Summoned to Rome by Archbishop Luigi Donati, he had learned that Pope Paul VII, a man who had done much to undo the Catholic Church’s terrible legacy of anti-Semitism, had died under mysterious circumstances. Though skeptical that the Holy Father had been murdered, Gabriel had nonetheless agreed to use the resources of the Office to undertake an informal investigation. It led him to Florence, where he witnessed the brutal killing of a missing Swiss Guard, and then to a cottage outside Fribourg, where an unfinished letter fell from a framed picture of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.
The letter concerned a book His Holiness had discovered in the Vatican Secret Archives. A book purportedly based on the memoirs of the Roman prefect of Judea who sentenced Jesus to death by crucifixion. A book that contradicted the accounts of Jesus’ death contained in the canonical Gospels, accounts that were the seedbed of two thousand years of sometimes murderous anti-Semitism.
The book was missing, but the men who took it were hiding in plain sight. They were members of a reactionary and secretive Catholic order founded in southern Germany by a priest who found much to admire in the politics of the European far right, especially National Socialism. The spiritual descendants of this priest, whose name was Ulrich Schiller, planned to steal the approaching papal conclave and elect one of their own as the next supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church. As chief of the Office, Gabriel had determined that such a development would not be in the interests of the State of Israel or Europe’s 1.5 million Jews. Therefore, it was his intention to help his friend Luigi Donati steal the conclave back.
To do so required undeniable proof of the Order’s plot. Time was of the essence. Gabriel needed the information no later than Thursday night, the eve of the conclave. Fortunately, he had identified two important lay members involved in the conspiracy. One was a reclusive German industrialist named Jonas Wolf. The other was a former Bf V officer named Andreas Estermann.
Estermann would be arriving at Café Adagio on the Beethovenplatz at six p.m. Wednesday. He would be expecting a Swiss intelligence officer named Christoph Bittel. He would find the Office instead. Immediately following his abduction, he would be brought to the Munich safe house for questioning. Gabriel decreed that the interrogation would not be a fishing expedition. Estermann would merely sign his name to a statement the team had already prepared, a bill of particulars detailing the Order’s plot to steal the conclave. A retired professional, he would not break easily. Leverage would be required. The team would have to find that, too. All in a span of just thirty hours.
They lodged not a word of protest and posed not a single question. Instead, they opened their laptops, established secure links to Tel Aviv, and went to work. Two hours later, as a gentle snow whitened the lawns of the Englischer Garten, they fired their first shot.
37
MUNICH
THE E-MAIL THAT LANDED ON Andreas Estermann’s phone a few seconds later appeared to have been sent by Christoph Bittel. In truth, it had been dispatched by a twenty-two-year-old MIT-educated hacker from Unit 8200 in Tel Aviv. It sat on Estermann’s device for nearly twenty minutes, long enough for Gabriel to fear the worst. Finally, Estermann opened it and clicked on the attachment, a decade-old photograph of a Swiss-German gathering of spies in Bern. In doing so, he unleashed a sophisticated malware attack that instantly seized control of the phone’s operating system. Within minutes, it was exporting a year’s worth of e-mails, text messages, GPS data, telephone metadata, and Internet browsing history, all without Estermann’s knowledge. The Unit bounced the material securely from Tel Aviv to the safe house, along with a live feed from the phone’s microphone and camera. Even Estermann’s calendar entries, past and future, were theirs to peruse at will. On Wednesday evening he had a single appointment: drinks at Café Adagio, six o’clock.
Estermann’s contacts contained the private mobile numbers of Bishop Hans Richter and his private secretary, Father Markus Graf. Both succumbed to malware attacks launched by Unit 8200, as did Cardinal Camerlengo Domenico Albanese and Cardinal Archbishop Franz von Emmerich of Vienna, the man whom the Order had selected to be the next pope.
Elsewhere in Estermann’s contacts the team found evidence of the Order’s astonishing reach. It was as if an electronic version of Father Schiller’s leather-bound ledger had fallen into their laps. There were private phone numbers and e-mail addresses for Austrian chancellor Jörg Kaufmann, Italian prime minister Giuseppe Saviano, Cécile Leclerc of France’s Popular Front, Peter van der Meer of the Dutch Freedom Party, and, of course, Axel Brünner of Germany’s far-right
National Democrats. Analysis of the phone’s metadata revealed that Estermann and Brünner had spoken five times during the past week alone, a period that coincided with Brünner’s sudden surge in German public opinion polls.
Fortunately for the team, Estermann conducted much of his personal and professional correspondence via text message. For sensitive communications he used a service that promised end-to-end encryption and complete privacy, a promise Unit 8200 had long ago rendered empty. Not only was the team able to see his current texts in real time, they were able to review his deleted messages as well.
Gabriel’s name featured prominently in several exchanges, as did Luigi Donati’s. Indeed, Donati had appeared on the Order’s early-warning system within hours of the Holy Father’s death. The Order had been aware of Gabriel’s arrival in Rome and of his presence in Florence. It had learned of his visit to Switzerland from Father Erich, the village priest from Rechthalten. The phone betrayed that Estermann had visited Switzerland as well. GPS data confirmed he spent forty-nine minutes in Café du Gothard in Fribourg on the Saturday after the Holy Father’s death. Afterward, he had driven to Bonn, where he switched off the phone for a period of two hours and fifty-seven minutes.
If there was a bright spot, it was the cleanliness of Estermann’s personal life. The team found no evidence of a mistress or fondness for pornography. Estermann’s consumption of news was broad but tilted decidedly to the right. Several of the German websites he visited daily trafficked in false and misleading stories that inflamed public opinion against Muslim immigrants and the political left. Otherwise, he had no nasty browsing habits.
But no man is perfect, and few are without at least one weakness. Estermann’s, it turned out, was money. Analysis of his encrypted text messages revealed that he was in regular contact with a certain Herr Hassler, owner of a private bank in the principality of Liechtenstein. Analysis of Herr Hassler’s records, conducted without his consent, revealed the existence of an account in Estermann’s name. The team had found numerous such accounts spread throughout the world, but the one in tiny Liechtenstein was different.
