by Daniel Silva
“Forgive me if I’m not willing to accept the word of a man who has no address and no telephone number.”
It was an impressive performance but flawed by the fact that David Girard’s eyes were now fixed on the fragment of pottery. Gabriel had spent enough time around art dealers to see that his target was already calculating an offer. All he needed, thought Gabriel, was a small crack of the whip.
“In fairness, Herr Girard,” Gabriel said, “I should tell you that other parties are interested in acquiring the hydria. But I came to St. Moritz because I was told you had the ability to move merchandise like this with a single phone call.”
“I’m afraid you overestimate my abilities.”
Gabriel smiled as if to say he was having none of it. “Your list of Middle Eastern clients is legendary in the trade, Herr Girard. Surely, you have the means to produce a provenance that will satisfy one of them. By my estimate, the reassembled and restored hydria is worth four hundred thousand Swiss francs. I’d be willing to accept one hundred thousand for the fragments, leaving you a profit of three hundred thousand.” Another smile. “Not bad for the price of a long-distance call to Riyadh or Dubai.”
The dealer lapsed into a contemplative silence, thus surrendering any pretense that he was unwilling to handle the hydria. “Fifty thousand,” he countered, “payable on completion of the sale.”
Gabriel returned the fragment to its baize blanket. “If you want the hydria, Herr Girard, you will pay me the money up front. The price is not negotiable.”
“I need some time.”
“You have twenty-four hours.”
“How do I reach you?”
“You don’t. I’ll call you tomorrow at five for your answer. If it is yes, I will deliver the fragments at six and expect payment in full. If the answer is no, I will hang up, and you will never hear from me again.”
For their safe house, they had rented a handsome, timbered chalet on a snow-covered mountainside above the village, a bargain at five thousand Swiss francs a night. When Gabriel arrived, the entire team greeted him with a standing ovation. Then they played a recording of a phone call David Girard had just placed to a colleague in Hamburg, looking for information about a bottom feeder named Anton Drexler. “I could be mistaken,” Eli Lavon said, smiling, “but it sounds as if we are most definitely in play.”
It seemed no one had ever heard of him. Not a rumor in Zurich. Not a whisper in Geneva. Not so much as a peep in Basel or New York. In fact, the closest thing David Girard found to an actual sighting of a creature called Anton Drexler was a blurry story about someone matching his description trying to sell a couple of forged Greek goddesses to Sotheby’s a few years back. “Or did he call himself Dresden? Sorry I can’t be of more help, David. Lunch next time you’re in town?”
Finding nothing to discourage him from moving forward, Girard began making inquires of a different kind, namely, trying to locate a potential buyer for his potential new acquisition. As Gabriel had predicted, it took but a single phone call to Riyadh, where a lowly prince immediately threw his ghutra into the ring for three hundred thousand Swiss francs. Not content to rest there, Girard then rang a collector in Abu Dhabi who said he was in for three-twenty. A subsequent call to Moscow brought in a Russian oil trader at three-forty, at which point the real bidding began. It ended a few hours later with the Saudi prince reigning supreme at four and a quarter, payable on delivery.
It was then Girard phoned his man at the St. Moritz branch of Bank Julius Baer to request one hundred thousand Swiss francs in cash. He collected the money at four and by four-fifteen was back at the gallery, tapping the tip of Mikhail’s expensive gold pen nervously against the surface of his desk. In the garret room of the Jägerhof Hotel, it sounded like a jackhammer.
“How long do you think he’s going to do that?” Mikhail groaned.
“I suppose until I call him at five o’clock,” answered Gabriel.
“Why don’t you just get it over with?”
“Because Herr Drexler is a man of his word. And he said he would call at five.”
And so they sat together, Mikhail propped on the bed, Gabriel perched in the arrow slit window, David Girard banging away at his desk in anticipation of Herr Drexler’s call. Finally, at the stroke of five, Gabriel dialed the gallery on a disposable cell phone and in terse German posed a simple question.
“Yes or no?” After hearing Girard’s answer, he said, “I’ll be there in an hour. Make sure no one is around when I arrive.”
Gabriel severed the connection and removed the SIM card from the phone. For a moment, there was silence in the room. Then the staccato tapping started up again, even louder than before.
“If he doesn’t stop,” Mikhail said, “I’m going to walk over there and shoot him.”
“We need him to get inside Hezbollah’s funding network,” said Gabriel. “Then you can shoot him.”
During the next sixty minutes, Gabriel and Mikhail would be granted two reprieves from the tapping. The first occurred at 5:10, when Girard’s Swiss wife dropped by unexpectedly for a glass of champagne to celebrate the sale of the hydria. The second came at 5:40, when a guest from the adjacent hotel, apparently having nothing better to do, asked whether he might have a look at the merchandise. He was tall, French speaking, and deeply tanned, and dangling on his arm like a piece of jewelry was a ravishing young girl with short dark hair and a face that looked as though it had been painted by El Greco. They remained inside for fifteen minutes, though the girl spent most of that time studying her reflection in Girard’s windows. Leaving the gallery, they seemed to quarrel briefly until a few words whispered directly into the girl’s ear brought a smile to her childlike face. As they set off arm in arm across the square, they walked past Herr Anton Drexler, dealer of suspect antiquities, as though he were invisible.
After making one final check of his wristwatch, Gabriel presented himself at the entrance of Girard’s gallery and, at six precisely, placed his thumb upon the call button. He expected to hear the soothing purr of Girard’s buzzer but instead saw a flash of blinding white light. Then the limbless Roman boy came hurtling toward him through a wall of fire, and together they descended into darkness.
25
ST. MORITZ, SWITZERLAND
THE BOMB HAD BEEN EXPERTLY assembled and planted with care. Initially, the Swiss Federal Police concluded it had been detonated with a timing device, only to discover later it had been set off by a cell phone. The explosion blew out hundreds of windows in the center of the village, triggered a series of avalanches on the highest ski slopes, and collapsed a display of Dom Pérignon bottles in the ornate lobby of the Badrutt’s Palace Hotel. The broken glass was removed with typical Swiss efficiency, and order soon restored. Even so, everyone agreed that St. Moritz, the quaint former spa town in the Upper Engadine valley, would never be the same.
Despite the power of the explosion, only three people lost their lives, including the owner of the antiquities gallery where the bomb had been planted. An additional fifty-four people were wounded, including the president of a major Swiss bank, a famous English footballer, and a Czech supermodel who had come to St. Moritz to console herself after the dissolution of her third marriage. Most of the injured sustained only minor cuts and bruises, but there were numerous broken bones suffered by those blown from their feet by the force of the blast wave.
One of the most seriously injured victims could not be identified. He had been carrying no passport or credit cards at the time of the explosion and afterward could not seem to recall his name or why he was in St. Moritz to begin with. Suffering from numerous lacerations and a severe concussion, he remained hospitalized for several days after the incident, unaware, or so it seemed, that he was the subject of intense interest on the part of the Swiss police.
There was, for a start, the video footage showing him standing at the entrance of the gallery at the time the bomb exploded, wearing a wig and false eyeglasses, and holding an aluminum attaché case—al
l of which were eventually recovered by crime-scene investigators. And then there was the tall, gray-eyed man with a Russian accent who had tried to carry him from the square before being stopped by police. And the large, multilingual group of tourists who had fled a luxury slope-side chateau just three nights into a weeklong booking. A thorough search of the chateau produced not a single scrap of paper that would indicate the names and identities of those who had stayed there. The same was true of the Russian’s garret room at the Jägerhof Hotel.
The most intriguing piece of evidence, however, was the injured man’s distinctive face, which revealed itself slowly as the swelling receded and the bruising began to fade. It was well known to Swiss intelligence; in fact, there was an entire shelf in the file rooms of the DAP, the Swiss security service, devoted solely to his exploits on the soil of their blessed little land. And now, at long last, he had been delivered helpless into their hands. There were some who wanted to throw a net over him lest he slip through their fingers yet again, but cooler heads prevailed. And so they stood watch outside his door and waited for his injuries to heal. And when he was fit enough to leave the hospital, they placed him in handcuffs and took him away.
They bundled him into a helicopter without bothering to tell the local kantonspolizei and flew him at high speed to the headquarters of the Swiss Federal Police on the Nussbaumstrasse in Bern. After fingerprinting him and photographing his face from every conceivable angle, they locked him away in a holding cell. It had a small flat-screen television, a writing desk stocked with pens and stationery, and a comfortable bed with starched linens. Even the Swiss police, thought Gabriel, were excellent hoteliers.
They left him alone for several hours to ponder his predicament, then, without warning or legal representation, brought him handcuffed to an interrogation room. Waiting there was the officer in charge of Gabriel’s case. He called himself Ziegler. No first name, no rank, no small talk—just Ziegler. He was tall and Alpine, with the broad, square shoulders of a cross-country skier and a ruddy complexion. Arrayed on the table before him were many photographs of Gabriel at different stages of his career, and in various levels of disguise. They showed him entering and leaving banks, crossing hotel lobbies and borders, and, in one, walking along the embankment of a leaden Zurich canal in the company of the renowned Swiss violinist Anna Rolfe. Ziegler seemed especially proud of the display. Obviously, he had put a great deal of thought into it.
“We have a theory,” he began as Gabriel sat.
“I can hardly wait.”
Ziegler’s face remained as placid as a bottomless Swiss lake. “It seems that before coming to St. Moritz, you made a brief stop in France, where you stole a painting by Cézanne and a two-thousand-year-old Greek hydria. You then transported the vase in pieces across the border and attempted to sell it to David Girard of the Galleria Naxos. What Girard didn’t realize, however, is that you never had any intention of delivering the vase, since the true purpose of your little ruse de guerre was to kill him.”
“Why would I want to kill a Swiss antiquities dealer?”
“Because, as you already know, that antiquities dealer wasn’t Swiss. Well,” Ziegler added with a xenophobic frown, “not truly Swiss. He was born in southern Lebanon. And from what we’ve learned, he was apparently still doing plenty of business there. Which is why Israeli intelligence wanted him dead.”
“If we’d wanted him dead, we would have done it in a way that didn’t kill two innocent people in the process.”
“How noble of you, Herr Allon.”
“You seem to be forgetting one other minor detail,” said Gabriel wearily.
“What’s that?”
“That bomb nearly killed me.”
“Yes,” Ziegler replied matter-of-factly. “Perhaps the legendary Gabriel Allon has lost a step.”
Gabriel was returned to his holding cell and fed a proper Swiss meal of potato raclette and breaded veal. Afterward, he watched the evening news in German on SF 1. Fifteen minutes elapsed before they got around to a follow-up report on the bombing in St. Moritz. It was a feature piece about how the affair had adversely impacted holiday bookings. The story made no mention of David Girard’s connections to Hezbollah. Nor did it refer to any arrests in the case, which Gabriel regarded as an encouraging sign.
After dinner, a doctor silently inspected his cuts and changed a few of his bandages. Then he was taken back to the interrogation room for an evening session. This time, Ziegler was nowhere to be found. In his place was a thin officer with the pallor of a man who had no time for outdoor pursuits. He introduced himself as Christoph Bittel of the DAP’s counterterror division, which meant he was more spy than policeman. It was another encouraging sign. Policemen made arrests. Spies made deals.
“Before we begin,” he said evenly, “you should know that Ziegler and the Federal Department of Justice and Police intend to file formal charges against you tomorrow morning. They have more than enough evidence to ensure that you spend the rest of your life in a Swiss jail. You should also know that there are numerous people here in Bern who would love to be granted the honor of escorting you to your cell.”
“I had nothing to do with planting that bomb.”
“I know.”
Bittel picked up a remote control and pointed at a video monitor in the corner of the room. A few seconds later, two figures appeared on the screen—the tall French-speaking man and the girl with an El Greco face. Gabriel watched again as the man whispered intimately into her ear.
“These are the real bombers,” Bittel said, pausing the video. “The girl concealed the device in the gallery’s powder room while her colleague kept Girard busy.”
“Who are they?”
“We were hoping you’d be able to tell us.”
“I’d never seen them before that night.”
Bittel scrutinized Gabriel dubiously for a moment before switching off the video monitor. “You are a very lucky man, Allon. It seems you have a number of friends in high places. One of them has interceded on your behalf.”
“So that’s it? I’m free to go?”
“Not quite yet. You did violate numerous laws prohibiting foreign espionage activity—laws we take very seriously. We are a welcoming country,” he added, as though he were sharing highly classified information, “but we insist that visitors show us the courtesy of signing the guestbook on the way in, preferably under their own names.”
“And what would you have done if we’d asked for your help?”
“We would have sent you away and dealt with it ourselves,” Bittel said. “We’re Swiss. We don’t like outsiders meddling in our affairs.”
“Neither do we. But unfortunately we have to put up with it on a daily basis.”
“I’m afraid that’s what it means to be an Israeli,” Bittel said with a philosophical nod. “History dealt you a lousy hand, but that doesn’t mean you have the right to treat our country as some sort of intelligence resort.”
“My visits to your country were never all that enjoyable.”
“But they were always productive. And that’s all that counts. You’re industrious, Allon. We admire that.”
“So what do you want from me?”
“We would like you to close out your Swiss accounts.”
“Meaning?”
“I ask questions about your past operations, and you answer them. Truthfully, for a change,” he added pointedly.
“That could take a while.”
“I have nowhere else to go. And neither do you, Allon.”
“And if I refuse?”
“You will be formally charged with espionage, terrorism, and murder. And you will spend your hard-earned retirement here in Switzerland.”
Gabriel made a momentary show of thought. “I’m afraid it’s not good enough.”
“What’s not good enough?”
“The deal,” said Gabriel. “I want a better deal.”
“You’re in no position to make demands, Allon.”
&nb
sp; “You’ll never put me on trial, Bittel. I know far too much about the sins of your bankers and industrialists. It would be a public-relations disaster for Switzerland, just like the Holocaust accounts scandal.” He paused. “You remember that, don’t you? It was in all the papers.”
This time it was Bittel who made a display of deliberation. “All right, Allon. What do you want?”
“I think it’s time to open a new chapter in Israeli-Swiss relations.”
“And how might we do that?”
“You’d obviously been monitoring David Girard for some time,” Gabriel said. “I want copies of your files, including all the telephone and e-mail intercepts.”
“Out of the question.”
“It’s a brave new world, Bittel.”
“I’ll need the approval of my superiors.”
“I can wait,” Gabriel replied. “As you said, I have nowhere else to go.”
Bittel rose and left the interrogation room. Two minutes later, he returned. The Swiss were nothing if not efficient.
“I think it would be easier if we did this in reverse chronological order,” Bittel said, opening his notebook. “A few months ago, a resident of Zurich was beheaded in a hotel room in Dubai. We were wondering whether you could tell us why.”
Many years earlier, a Swiss dissident named Professor Emil Jacobi had given Gabriel a sound piece of advice. “When you’re dealing with Switzerland,” he explained, “it’s best to keep one thing in mind. Switzerland is not a real country. It’s a business, and it’s run like a business.”
Therefore, it came as no surprise to Gabriel that Bittel conducted the debriefing with the cold formality of a financial transaction. His manner was that of a private banker—polite but distant, thorough but discreet. He did his due diligence, but not with undue malice. Gabriel had the distinct impression the security man wanted nothing on the books that might cause him a problem later, that he was merely checking boxes and tallying up a ledger. But then, that was the way of the Swiss banker. The banker wanted the client’s money, but he didn’t necessarily care to know where it had come from.
