The Fallen Angel

by Daniel Silva

  “Look carefully at the man seated to his left,” said Gabriel. “Do you recognize him?”

  “Can’t say I do.”

  “How about now?”

  Gabriel gave Carter another photograph of the man. This time, it showed him entering the Iranian Embassy in Berlin.

  Carter looked up sharply. “Massoud?”

  “In the flesh.”

  The son of an Episcopal minister, Carter swore under his breath.

  “Our sentiments exactly.”

  Carter placed the photograph on the table next to the others and stared at it in silence. Massoud Rahimi was one of those rare inhabitants of the secret world who required no introduction. In fact, most never bothered with his family name. He was just Massoud, a man whose fingerprints were on every major act of terrorism linked to Iran since the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. These days, Massoud worked from the Iranian Embassy in Berlin, which doubled as VEVAK’s main Western forward-operating base for terror. He carried a diplomatic passport under another name and claimed to be a low-level functionary in the consular section. Even the Germans, who maintained uncomfortably close trade relations with Iran, didn’t believe a word of it.

  “So what’s your theory?” asked Carter.

  “Let’s just say we don’t believe it was a coincidence that Massoud and David Girard were riding the same streetcar in Zurich.”

  “Do you think Massoud ordered the bombing in St. Moritz?”

  “That’s Massoud’s way,” said Gabriel. “He’s never been shy about inflicting a little martyrdom on his own side when he has an important secret to protect.”

  “And now you want to find out the nature of that secret.”

  “Exactly.”

  “How?”

  “We were hoping Massoud would agree to tell us himself.”

  “You’re thinking about trying to buy him off?”

  “Massoud would sooner slit his own wrists than accept money from Jews.”

  “A coerced defection?”

  “There isn’t time.”

  Carter fell into a heavy silence. “I don’t need to remind you that Massoud carries a diplomatic passport,” he said after a moment. “And that makes him untouchable.”

  “No one is untouchable. Not when lives are at stake.”

  “Massoud is,” Carter responded. “And if you touch so much as a hair on his head, it will be open season on every Israeli diplomat in the world.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, Adrian, it already is. Besides,” Gabriel added, “I didn’t come here for advice.”

  “So why are you here?”

  “I want to know whether the playing field is clear.”

  “I can state categorically that the Agency is nowhere near the field,” said Carter. “But you should know that the Germans thought about making a run at him a couple of years ago.”

  “What kind of run?”

  “Apparently, Massoud has a taste for the finer things in life. He routinely skims a bit off the top of his operational budget and squirrels it away in banks all over Europe. The BND had him cold. They were planning to sit down with Massoud for a little chat, at the end of which they would give him a simple choice: work for us, or we’ll tell your masters in Tehran that you’re embezzling state funds.”

  “How do you know about this?”

  “Because the Germans came to me and asked whether the Agency wanted in. They even gave me a copy of the evidence they had against him.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” Carter said. “It was during the period when the White House thought it could sweet-talk the Iranians into giving up their nuclear program. The president and his team didn’t want to do anything that might make the Iranians angry. As it turned out, neither did the German chancellor. She was afraid it might interfere with all the business her firms were doing in Iran.”

  “So it died,” said Gabriel. “And a murderer sits in Berlin plotting an attack on my country.”

  “So it would appear.”

  “Where’s that batch of material from the BND?”

  “Locked away in the file rooms of Langley.”

  “I want it.”

  “You can have it,” Carter replied, “but it’ll cost you.”

  “How much?”

  “I have a long list of questions I’d like answered.”

  “Why don’t you just join us for the fun?”

  “Because I don’t want to be within a hundred miles of the fun.” Carter looked at Gabriel seriously. “Will you allow me to give you two pieces of advice?”

  “If you must.”

  “Invent a good cover story,” said Carter. “And whatever you do, don’t screw it up. Otherwise, there’s a very good chance you’re going to start World War Three.”

  Carter requested the German documents in a way that left only a wispy contrail in Langley’s atmosphere, and within an hour they were delivered to his doorstep by an Agency courier. Since Carter could not hand over the documents and still maintain any plausible deniability, Gabriel spent the remainder of that warm afternoon on Carter’s porch, committing the details of Massoud’s financial misdeeds to memory. Carter walked him through some of the finer points but devoted most of his time to the list of questions he wanted put to Massoud. He wrote them in longhand and then burned the unused pages of his yellow legal pad. Carter was a spy’s spy whose devotion to tried-and-true tradecraft was absolute. According to the wits at Langley, he left chalk marks on the bedpost when he wanted to make love to his wife.

  It was approaching four when Gabriel finished reviewing all the documents, leaving him barely enough time to catch the evening Lufthansa flight to Berlin. As they headed outside to the waiting Escalade, Carter seemed disappointed that Gabriel was leaving. Indeed, he was so oddly attentive that Gabriel was somewhat surprised when he didn’t remind him to buckle his seat belt.

  “Something bothering you, Adrian?”

  “I was just wondering whether you’re really up for this.”

  “The next person who asks me that is—”

  “It’s a fair question,” Carter said, cutting Gabriel off. “If one of my men went through what you did in the Empty Quarter, he’d be on permanent vacation.”

  “I tried.”

  “Maybe you should try harder next time.” Carter shook Gabriel’s hand. “Drop me a postcard from Berlin. And if you happen to get arrested, please try to forget where you got the information about Massoud’s extracurricular activities.”

  “It will be our little secret, Adrian. Just like everything else.”

  Carter smiled and closed the door. Gabriel saw him one last time, standing curbside with his arm raised as though he were hailing a taxi. Then the Escalade rumbled round a bend, and Carter was gone. Gabriel gazed out the tinted windows at the manicured lawns and the young trees swollen with blossoms, but in his thoughts there were only numbers. The numbers of Massoud’s secret accounts. And the hours remaining until Massoud made the streets run red with blood.

  28

  WANNSEE, BERLIN

  AMONG THE OPERATION’S MANY ENDURING mysteries was how the team’s Berlin safe house came to be located in the district of Wannsee. The head of Housekeeping would claim it was a mere coincidence, that he had chosen the property simply for reasons of availability and function. Only later, when the official history of the affair was being chiseled into stone, would he admit that his decision had been influenced by none other than Ari Shamron. Shamron had wanted to remind Gabriel and the team of what had happened in Wannsee in January 1942, when fifteen senior Nazis gathered over lunch in a lakeside villa to thrash out the bureaucratic details of the extermination of a people. And perhaps, all agreed, he had wanted to remind the team of the potential price of failure.

  The safe house itself stood about a half-mile to the south of the site of the Wannsee Conference, on a densely wooded lane aptly named the Lindenstrasse. Two high walls surrounded it, one of crumbling brick, the other of overgrown
greenery. The empty rooms smelled of damp and dust and faintly of brandy. Fat calico carp dozed beneath the ice cap of the fishpond.

  The members of the team posed as employees of something called VisionTech, a Montreal-based firm that existed only in the imagination of a desk officer at King Saul Boulevard. According to their cover story, they had come to Berlin to launch a joint venture with a German firm, which explained the unusual number of computers and other pieces of technical equipment they had in their possession. They kept most of it in the large formal dining room, which served as their ops center. Within hours of their arrival, its walls were covered with large-scale maps and with surveillance photos of a man who pretended to be a low-level clerk at the Iranian Embassy but was in fact his country’s top mastermind of international terror.

  Dina happily accepted the assignment of preparing the questions for Massoud’s long-overdue interrogation, and to enter her workspace was to enter a classroom dedicated to the evolution of modern terrorism. Massoud Rahimi had been at the center of it, beginning in November 1979, when he had been among the students and militants who stormed the American Embassy in Tehran. Several of the fifty-two hostages would later identify him as the cruelest of their tormentors. Mock executions were his favorite form of entertainment. Even then, Massoud enjoyed nothing more than seeing an American beg for his life.

  His next star turn came in Lebanon in 1982, when he began working with a new Shiite militant group known as the Organization of the Oppressed on Earth. It was said that Massoud was instrumental in shortening the group’s name to the Party of God, or Hezbollah. It was also said that he personally helped to assemble the twelve-thousand-pound truck bomb that destroyed the U.S. Marine barracks at Beirut Airport at 6:22 a.m. on October 23, 1983. The explosion, the largest non-nuclear detonation since the Second World War, killed 243 American servicemen and forever changed the face of global terror. More attacks followed. Planes were hijacked, hostages were taken, embassies were bombed. All had one thing in common. They were carried out at the behest of the man who now worked from the Iranian Embassy in Berlin, protected by the shield of a diplomatic passport.

  But how to convince a man such as Massoud to relinquish his most murderous secrets? And how to take possession of him in the first place? They would have to engage in the time-honored Shiite practice known as taqiyya, displaying one intention while harboring another. They were not going to kidnap Massoud, said Gabriel. They were going to be his saviors and protectors. And when they were finished wringing him dry, they were going to let him go his merry way. Catch and release, he called it. No harm, no foul.

  They would have preferred to watch him for a month or more, but it wasn’t possible; the red lights were flashing at King Saul Boulevard, with all the intelligence pointing to a major attack in a week or less. They had to take Massoud into custody before the bombs exploded, or before Tehran found an excuse to summon him home. That was Gabriel’s greatest fear, that VEVAK would put Massoud on ice before the attack, leaving him beyond the reach of the Office or anyone else. And so Gabriel set a deadline of three days—three days to plan and execute the abduction of an Iranian diplomat in the heart of Berlin. When Eli Lavon placed their odds at just one in four, Gabriel took him into Dina’s makeshift office to see the photographs of what might happen if they failed. “I don’t want odds,” said Gabriel. “I want Massoud.”

  Their assignment was made slightly easier by the fact that Massoud obviously felt secure on German soil. His schedule—at least in the brief time they were able to observe it—was strictly regimented. He spent most of his time inside the VEVAK station at the embassy, which was coincidentally located next door to the German Archaeological Institute, a good omen, in the opinion of the team. He arrived no later than eight a.m. and remained until late in the evening. His apartment was two miles to the north of the embassy, in the section of Berlin known as Charlottenburg. His official car appeared unarmored, though that was not true of the VEVAK-issue thug who served as his driver and bodyguard. The task of neutralizing the bodyguard on the night of the snatch fell to Mikhail. Not that he needed much convincing. After spending years dodging Iranian-supplied bullets while serving in the IDF, he was anxious to return the favor.

  But where to do it? A busy street? A quiet one? A traffic signal? Massoud’s doorstep? Gabriel decreed that the spot would be determined by just one factor. It had to offer them a clear route of escape in the event of either success or failure. If they chose a spot too close to the Iranian embassy, they might find themselves in a shootout with the German police who guarded it day and night. But if they let Massoud get too close to his apartment, they could become ensnarled in Charlottenburg’s heavy traffic. In the end, the choice was clear to everyone. Gabriel marked the location on the map with a blood-red pin. To Eli Lavon, it looked like a gravestone.

  With that, the operation settled into the phase the team referred to as “final approach.” They had their target, they had their plan, they had their assignments. Now all they had to do was get the aircraft on the ground without killing themselves and everyone else on board. They had no computers to guide them, so they would have to do it the old-fashioned way, with instincts and nerve and perhaps a bit of good fortune as well. They tried to keep their reliance on providence to a bare minimum. Gabriel believed that operational luck was something to be earned, not counted upon. And it usually came about as a result of meticulous planning and preparation.

  In the lexicon of the Office, the operation was “wheel heavy,” meaning it would require several vehicles of different makes and models. Transport, the Office division that saw to such matters, acquired most from friendly European rental agents in ways that could not be traced back to any member of the team. The most important vehicle, however, was Office owned. A Volkswagen van with a concealed human storage compartment, it had played a starring role in one of Gabriel’s most celebrated operations—the seizure of Nazi war criminal Erich Radek from his home in the First District of Vienna. Chiara had been behind the wheel that night. Radek still made regular appearances in the worst of her nightmares.

  Much to her dismay, Chiara was not among those present in Berlin, though her role in the operation remained central. Her task was to coordinate the elaborate piece of taqiyya that would cover the team’s tracks and, if successful, throw both the Germans and the Iranians off its scent. Like all good lies, it was plausible and contained elements of truth. And perhaps, said Gabriel, it also contained a thread of hope for the future—a future where Iran was no longer in the grip of a cabal of religious madmen. The mullahs and their henchmen in the Revolutionary Guard were not rational actors. They were unpredictable and apocalyptic. And the Middle East would never know true peace until they were ushered into history.

  There were other lies as well, such as the canvas rucksack filled with cream-colored clay, wires, and timing devices, and the small limpet-style mine that was far more sound than fury. But they would all be for naught unless they could extract Massoud from his car with a minimum of violence. After much deliberation, it was decided that Yaakov would serve as the sharp end of the sword, with Oded, a blunt object of a man, playing a supporting role. An experienced interrogator of terrorists, Yaakov had a face and demeanor that left little doubt he meant what he said. More important, Yaakov was a descendant of German Jews and, like Gabriel, spoke fluent German. It would be Yaakov’s job to talk Massoud out of the car. And if words didn’t work, Oded would bring down a very large hammer.

  They didn’t dare rehearse in public, so they conducted countless miniature dry runs within the confines of the Wannsee safe house. In the beginning, Gabriel’s demeanor was businesslike, but as the practice sessions dragged on, his mood grew brittle. Mikhail feared he was suffering an operational hangover from the bombing in St. Moritz, or perhaps from the nightmare in the Empty Quarter. But Eli Lavon knew otherwise. It was Berlin, he said. For all of them, Berlin was a city of ghosts, but it was especially true for Gabriel. It had been the home of his matern
al grandparents. And in all likelihood, it would have been Gabriel’s home, too, were it not for the band of murderers who had gathered in the lakeside villa just up the road.

  And so they listened with admirable patience as he challenged every aspect of the plan for what seemed like the hundredth time. And they treated themselves to a small smile when he gave Yaakov and Oded a thorough dressing-down after a particularly dreadful final walk-through. And they were careful not to creep up on him when he was alone because, despite a lifetime in the trade, he was suffering from an unusual bout of nerves. And finally, on their last afternoon in Berlin, when they could bear his ill temper no more, they darkened his distinctive gray temples and concealed his unforgettable green eyes behind a pair of glasses. Then they bundled him in a coat and scarf and, with a gentle nudge, cast him out of the safe house to walk among the souls of the dead.

  The field man in him wanted to see it all at least once with his own eyes—the embassy, the watch posts, the fallback positions, the snatch point. Afterward, he boarded an S-Bahn train that bore him across Berlin to the Brandenburg Gate. Now on the old East German side of the city, he made his way along the Unter den Linden, beneath the bare limbs of the lime trees. At the Friedrichstrasse, the center of Berlin’s debauched nightlife during the 1920s, he turned right and headed into the district known as Mitte. Here and there he glimpsed a relic of the neighborhood’s Stalinist past, but for the most part the architectural stains of communism had been scrubbed away. It was as if the Cold War, like the real war that preceded it, had never happened. In modern Mitte, there were no memories, only prosperity.

  At the Kronenstrasse, Gabriel turned right again and followed the street eastward until he arrived at a modern apartment house with large square windows that shone like slabs of onyx. Long ago, before communism, before the war, the spot had been occupied by a handsome neoclassical building of gray stone. On the second floor had lived a German Expressionist painter named Viktor Frankel, his wife, Sarah, and their daughter, Irene, Gabriel’s mother. Gabriel had never seen a photograph of the apartment, but once, when he was a young boy, his mother had tried to sketch it for him before breaking down in tears. Here was the place where they had lived a charmed bourgeois life filled with art, music, and afternoons in the Tiergarten. And here was the place they had stayed as the noose tightened slowly around their necks. Finally, in the autumn of 1942, they were herded by their fellow countrymen aboard a cattle car and deported east to Auschwitz. Gabriel’s grandparents were gassed upon arrival, but his mother was sent to the women’s work camp at Birkenau. She never told Gabriel of her experiences. Instead, she committed them to paper and locked them away in the archives of Yad Vashem.