The Order

by Daniel Silva

  “Estermann’s wife, Johanna, is the beneficiary,” said Dina Sarid.

  “What’s the current balance?” asked Gabriel.

  “Just north of a million and a half.”

  “When was it opened?”

  “About three months ago. He’s made sixteen deposits. Each one was one hundred thousand euros exactly. If you ask me, he’s skimming from the payments he’s making to the cardinals.”

  “What about the Vatican Bank?”

  “The accounts of twelve of the cardinal-electors have received large wire transfers in the last six weeks. Four were over a million. The rest were around eight hundred thousand. All of them can be traced back to Estermann.”

  But the ultimate source of the money was the secretive Munich-based conglomerate that Alessandro Ricci had described as the Order of St. Helena Inc. Eli Lavon, the team’s most experienced financial investigator, took it upon himself to penetrate the company’s defenses. They were formidable, which came as no surprise. After all, he had matched wits with the Order once before. Twenty years ago, he had been at a distinct disadvantage. Now he had Unit 8200 in his corner, and he had Jonas Wolf.

  The German businessman proved to be as elusive as the company that bore his name, beginning with the basics of his biography. As far as Lavon could tell, Wolf had been born somewhere in Germany, sometime during the war. He had been educated at Heidelberg University—of that, Lavon was certain—and had earned a PhD in applied mathematics. He acquired his first company, a small chemical firm, in 1970 with money borrowed from a friend. Within ten years he had expanded into shipping, manufacturing, and construction. And by the mid-1980s he was an extraordinarily wealthy man.

  He purchased a graceful old town house in the Maxvorstadt district of Munich and a valley high in the Obersalzberg, northeast of Berchtesgaden. It was his intention to create a baronial refuge for his family and their descendants. But when his wife and two sons were killed in a private plane crash in 1988, Wolf’s mountain redoubt became his prison. Once or twice a week, weather permitting, he traveled to Wolf Group’s headquarters in north Munich by helicopter. But for the most part he remained in the Obersalzberg, surrounded by his small army of bodyguards. He had not granted an interview in more than twenty years. Not since the release of an unauthorized biography that accused him of arranging the plane crash that killed his family. Reporters who tried to pry open the locked rooms of his past faced financial ruin or, in the case of a meddlesome British investigative journalist, physical violence. Wolf’s involvement in the reporter’s death—she was killed by a hit-and-run driver while cycling through the countryside near Devon—was much rumored but never proven.

  To Eli Lavon, the story of Jonas Wolf’s spectacular rise sounded too good to be true. There was, for a start, the loan Wolf had received to purchase his first company. Lavon had a hunch, based on hard-won experience, that Wolf’s lender had been a Canton Zug–based concern known as the Order of St. Helena. Furthermore, Lavon was of the opinion—again, it was merely well-informed conjecture—that the Wolf Group was far larger than advertised.

  Because it was an entirely private company, one that had never received a single loan from a single German bank, Lavon’s options for traditional financial inquiry were limited. Estermann’s phone, however, opened many doors within the firm’s computer network that might otherwise have remained closed, even to the cybersleuths at Unit 8200. Shortly after eight o’clock that evening, they tunneled into Jonas Wolf’s personal database and found the keys to the kingdom, a two-hundred-page document detailing the company’s global holdings and the staggering income they generated.

  “Two and a half billion in pure profit last year alone,” announced Lavon. “And where do you think it all goes?”

  That evening the team set aside its work long enough to share a traditional family meal. Mikhail Abramov and Natalie Mizrahi were absent, however, for they dined at Café Adagio in the Beethovenplatz. It was located in the basement level of a yellow building on the square’s northwestern flank. By day it served bistro fare, but at night it was one of the neighborhood’s most popular bars. Mikhail and Natalie pronounced the food mediocre but judged the likelihood of successfully abducting a patron to be quite high.

  “Three stars on the Michelin scale,” quipped Mikhail upon their return to the safe house. “If Estermann comes to Café Adagio alone, he leaves in the back of a van.”

  The team took delivery of the vehicle in question, a Mercedes transit van, at nine the following morning, along with two Audi A8 sedans, two BMW motor scooters, a set of false German registration plates, four Jericho .45-caliber pistols, an Uzi Pro compact submachine gun, and a 9mm Beretta with a walnut grip.

  At which point the tension in the safe house seemed to rise by several notches. As was often the case, Gabriel’s mood darkened as the zero hour drew near. Mikhail reminded him that a year earlier, in a warehouse in a drab commercial district of Tehran, a sixteen-member team had blowtorched its way into thirty-two safes and removed several hundred computer discs and millions of pages of documents. The team had then loaded the material into a cargo truck and driven it to the shore of the Caspian Sea, where a boat had been waiting. The operation had shocked the world and proved once again that the Office could strike at will, even in the capital of its most implacable foe.

  “And how many Iranians did you have to kill in order to get out of the country alive?”

  “Details, details,” said Mikhail dismissively. “The point is, we can do this with our eyes closed.”

  “I’d rather you do it with your eyes open. It will substantially increase our chances of success.”

  By midday Gabriel had managed to convince himself that they were doomed to failure, that he would spend the rest of his life in a German prison cell for crimes too numerous to recall, an ignoble end to a career against which all others would be measured. Eli Lavon accurately diagnosed the source of Gabriel’s despair, for he was suffering from the same malady. It was Munich, thought Lavon. And it was the book.

  It was never far from their thoughts, especially Lavon’s. There was not one member of the team whose life had not been altered by the longest hatred. Nearly all had lost relatives to the fires of the Holocaust. Some had been born only because one member of a family had found the will to survive. Like Isabel Feldman, the only surviving child of Samuel Feldman, who handed over a small fortune in cash and valuables to the Order of St. Helena in exchange for false baptismal certificates and false promises of protection.

  Another such woman was Irene Frankel. Born in Berlin, she was deported to Auschwitz in the autumn of 1942. Her parents were gassed upon arrival, but Irene Frankel left Auschwitz on the Death March in January 1945. She arrived in the new State of Israel in 1948. There she met a man from Munich, a writer, an intellectual, who had escaped to Palestine before the war. In Germany his name had been Greenberg, but in Israel he had taken the name Allon. After marrying, they vowed to have six children, one for each million murdered, but a single child was all her womb could bear. She named the child Gabriel, the messenger of God, the interpreter of Daniel’s visions.

  At two o’clock they all realized it had been several minutes since anyone had seen him or heard his voice. A rapid search of the safe house revealed no trace of him, and a call to his phone received no answer. Unit 8200 confirmed the device was powered on and that it was moving through the Englischer Garten at a walking pace. Eli Lavon was confident he knew where it was headed. The child of Irene Frankel wanted to see where it had happened. Lavon couldn’t blame him. He was suffering from the same malady.

  38

  MUNICH

  IN JULY 1935, TWO AND a half years after electorally seizing control of Germany, Adolf Hitler formally declared Munich “the Capital of the Movement.” The city’s ties to National Socialism were undeniable. The Nazi Party was formed in Munich in the turbulent years after Germany’s defeat in World War I. And it was in Munich, in the autumn of 1923, that Hitler led the abortive Beer
Hall Putsch that resulted in his brief incarceration at Landsberg Prison. There he penned the first volume of Mein Kampf, the rambling manifesto in which he described Jews as germs that needed to be exterminated. During his first year as chancellor, the year in which he transformed Germany into a totalitarian dictatorship, the book sold more than a million copies.

  Throughout the fifteen cataclysmic years of the Nazi era, Hitler traveled to Munich frequently. He maintained a large, art-filled apartment at Prinzregentenplatz 16 and commissioned the construction of a personal office building overlooking the Königsplatz. Known as the Führerbau it contained living quarters for Hitler and his deputy, Rudolf Hess, and a cavernous central hall with twin stone staircases that led to a conference room. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement in the Führerbau on September 30, 1938. Upon his return to London, he predicted the accord would deliver “peace in our time.” A year later the Wehrmacht invaded Poland, plunging the world into war and setting in motion the chain of events that would lead to the destruction of Europe’s Jews.

  Much of central Munich was leveled by a pair of devastating Allied bombing raids in April 1944, but somehow the Führerbau survived. Immediately after the war, the Allies used it as a storage facility for looted art. It was now the home of a respected school of music and theater, where pianists, cellists, violinists, and actors perfected their craft in rooms where murderers once walked. Bicycles lined the building’s leaden facade, and at the foot of the main steps stood two bored-looking Munich police officers. Neither paid any heed to the man of medium height and build who paused to review a schedule of upcoming public recitals.

  He continued past the Alte Pinakothek, Munich’s world-class art museum, and then turned left onto the Hessstrasse. It was ten minutes before he caught his first glimpse of the modern tower rising above the Olympic Park. The old Olympic Village lay to the north, not far from the headquarters of BMW and a highly profitable German conglomerate known as the Wolf Group. He found the Connollystrasse and followed it to the squat three-story apartment house at number 31.

  The building had long ago been converted into student housing, but in early September 1972 it had been inhabited by members of Israel’s Olympic team. At 4:30 a.m. on September 5, eight Palestinian terrorists dressed in tracksuits scaled an undefended fence. Carrying duffel bags filled with Kalashnikov rifles, Tokarev semiautomatic pistols, and Soviet-made hand grenades, they used a stolen key to unlock the door of apartment 1. Two Israelis, wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg and weight lifter Yossef Romano, were murdered during the first moments of the siege. Nine others were taken hostage.

  For the remainder of that day, as a global television audience watched in horror, German authorities negotiated with two heavily disguised terrorists—one known as Issa, the other Tony—while across the street the Games continued. Finally, at ten p.m., the hostages were flown by helicopter to Fürstenfeldbruck Air Base, where German police had put in place an ill-conceived rescue operation. It ended with the death of all nine Israelis.

  Within hours of the massacre, Israeli prime minister Golda Meir ordered a legendary Office agent named Ari Shamron to “send forth the boys.” The operation was code-named Wrath of God, a phrase chosen by Shamron to give his undertaking the patina of divine sanction. One of the boys was a gifted young painter from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design named Gabriel Allon. Another was Eli Lavon, a promising biblical archaeologist. In the Hebrew-based lexicon of the team, Lavon was an ayin, a tracker. Gabriel was an aleph, an assassin. For three years they stalked their prey across Western Europe and the Middle East, killing at night and in broad daylight, living in fear that at any moment they might be arrested by local authorities and charged as murderers. In all, twelve men died at their hands. Gabriel personally killed six of the terrorists with a .22-caliber Beretta pistol. Whenever possible, he shot his victims eleven times, one for each Jew murdered at Munich. When finally he returned to Israel, his temples were gray. Lavon was left with numerous stress disorders, including a notoriously fickle stomach that troubled him to this day.

  He crept up on Gabriel without a sound and joined him in front of Connollystrasse 31.

  “I wouldn’t do that again if I were you, Eli. You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you.”

  “I tried to make a bit of noise.”

  “Try harder next time.”

  Lavon looked up toward the balcony of apartment 1. “Come here often?”

  “Actually, it’s been a while.”

  “How long?”

  “A hundred years,” said Gabriel distantly.

  “I come here every time I’m in Munich. And I always think the same thing.”

  “What’s that, Eli?”

  “Our Olympic team should never have been assigned to this building. It was too isolated. We expressed our concerns to the Germans a few weeks before the Games began, but they assured us our athletes would be safe. Unfortunately, they neglected to tell us that German intelligence had already received a tip from a Palestinian informant that the Israeli team had been targeted.”

  “It must have slipped their minds.”

  “Why didn’t they warn us? Why didn’t they take steps to protect our athletes?”

  “You tell me.”

  “They didn’t tell us,” said Lavon, “because they didn’t want anything to spoil their postwar coming-out party, least of all a threat against the descendants of the same people they had tried to exterminate just thirty years before. Remember, the German intelligence and security services were founded by men like Reinhard Gehlen. Men who had worked for Hitler and the Nazis. Men of the right who hated communism and Jews in equal measure. It’s no wonder they were attracted to someone like Andreas Estermann.” He turned to Gabriel. “Did you happen to notice the last job he held before his retirement?”

  “Head of Department Two, the counterextremism division.”

  “So why is he spending so much time on the phone with the likes of Axel Brünner? And why does he have the private cell number of every far-right leader in Europe?” Lavon paused. “And why did he turn off his phone for three hours in Bonn the other night?”

  “Maybe he has a girlfriend there.”

  “Estermann? He’s a choirboy.”

  “A doctrinaire choirboy.”

  Lavon lifted his gaze once more toward the facade of the building. A light was burning in the window of apartment 1. “Do you ever imagine how differently our lives would have turned out if it hadn’t happened?”

  “Munich?”

  “No,” answered Lavon. “All of it. Two thousand years of hatred. We’d be as numerous as all the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore, just as God promised Abraham. I’d be living in a grand apartment in the First District of Vienna, a leader in my field, a man of distinction. I’d spend my afternoons sipping coffee and eating strudel at Café Sacher, and my evenings listening to Mozart and Haydn. Occasionally, I’d visit an art gallery and see works by a famous Berlin painter named Gabriel Frankel, the son of Irene Frankel, the grandson of Viktor Frankel, perhaps the greatest German painter of the twentieth century. Who knows? Perhaps I might even be wealthy enough to purchase one or two of his works.”

  “I’m afraid life doesn’t work that way, Eli.”

  “I suppose not. But would it be too much to ask for them to stop hating us? Why is anti-Semitism on the rise again in Europe? Why is it not safe to be a Jew in this country? Why has the shame of the Holocaust worn off? Why won’t it ever end?”

  “Nine words,” said Gabriel.

  A silence fell between them. It was Lavon who broke it.

  “Where do you suppose it is?”

  “The Gospel of Pilate?”

  Lavon nodded.

  “Up a chimney.”

  “How appropriate.” Lavon’s tone was uncharacteristically bitter. He started to light a cigarette but stopped himself. “It goes without saying that the Nazis were the ones who annihilated the Jews of Europe. But they could not have carr
ied out the Final Solution unless Christianity had first plowed the soil. Hitler’s willing executioners had been conditioned by centuries of Church teachings about the evils of the Jews. Austrian Catholics made up a disproportionate share of the death camp officers, and the survival rates for Jews were far lower in Catholic countries.”

  “But thousands of Catholics risked their lives to protect us.”

  “Indeed, they did. They chose to act on their own initiative rather than wait for encouragement from their pope. As a result, they saved their Church from the moral abyss.” Lavon’s eyes searched the old Olympic Village. “We should be getting back to the safe house. It will be dark soon.”

  “It already is,” said Gabriel.

  Lavon finally lit his cigarette. “Why do you suppose he switched off his phone for three hours the other night?”

  “Estermann?”

  Lavon nodded.

  “I don’t know,” answered Gabriel. “But I intend to ask him.”

  “Maybe you should ask him about the Gospel of Pilate, too.”

  “Don’t worry, Eli. I will.”

  WHEN GABRIEL AND LAVON RETURNED to the safe house, the members of the snatch team were gathered in the sitting room, dressed for an evening out at a trendy café in the Beethovenplatz. There was no outward sign of nerves other than the incessant tapping of Mikhail’s forefinger against the arm of his chair. He was listening intently to the voice of Andreas Estermann, who was addressing the members of his senior staff about the need to increase security at all Wolf Group facilities, especially the chemical plants. It seemed Estermann had received a warning from an old contact at the BfV, a warning the team had overheard. The system, apparently, was blinking red.

  By five fifteen it was blinking red inside the safe house as well. The members of the snatch team took their leave in the same manner they had arrived—intermittently, alone or in pairs, so as not to attract attention from the neighbors. By 5:45 they all had reached their fail-safe points.