Promised Land

by Martin Fletcher

  Inside the office Peter passed by Diana’s desk. “Where’s Gingie?” he asked.

  “What happened?” Diana said. “Quick, she’ll be back in a moment. And, by the way, the police called again, about the file.”

  He looked up and down the corridor, half-closed the door, and whispered, “Arie says it was an accident. I bet it wasn’t, though, he’s a terrible liar. Did you tell Tamara what we know?”

  “No, of course not, that her husband’s a murderer? That’s all she needs. Anyway, we didn’t know for sure.”

  “Well we’re sure enough now. We have to bury this here. But what did you say? The police called again? Already? What’s the hurry?”

  “I don’t know. Gingie spoke to them. And also, Harel is in the building. To do with the trial in Cairo, and what we do next. And Sela was looking for you.”

  “All right, thanks.” He went out into the corridor and bumped into Gingie.

  “At last, there you are,” she said. “Harel wants to see you. And there’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “The police. The murdered man, Yonathan Schwartz? They’ve established a connection between him and a man. They have a waiter who saw them arguing in a café, the day Schwartz disappeared. Guess who the man was. Your brother.”

  Peter felt his flesh crawl. “Oh, crap.”

  “So they want to interview Diana again, I suppose to gather material before they call for him. It’s gone right to the top.”

  “Harel? Oh, no.” It’ll take the police precisely five minutes to fill in the dots. And Harel, ten seconds. “He wants to see me?”

  “Yes. But that was before the thing with the police.”

  “Alone? Or there’s a meeting?

  “Both.”

  Germany, then.

  PETER

  BONN, GERMANY

  November 1954

  Eight o’clock at night. Between the almost full moon, the new fluorescent street lamps, and the brightly lit shop windows, it may as well have been midday outside Bonn’s municipal swimming pool.

  “This is where you want to snatch him?” Peter said incredulously to Yehuda, who sat in the driver’s seat of the rented Volkswagen Beetle. “This is what we pay you for?”

  Yehuda couldn’t repress a snigger. “Well, it was dark when we chose it. But that was eight weeks ago. It isn’t our fault you took so long to get the green light.”

  “Don’t get me started.”

  “The plan was to wait till there’s no moon. But they put in special new lightbulbs last week, and we didn’t know they light up the Christmas windows so early.”

  “They lose the war and look at those shop displays. The luxury. Amazing. It could be Paris.”

  “You’re kidding. Paris? I’ve been there. You think they won the war? They’ve got nothing.”

  “Nothing? I’d like that nothing. Tel Aviv has nothing.”

  “Anyway,” Yehuda said, “this isn’t the place. This is where we start following Bohlendorf. He comes out at 8:00 P.M. three times a week like clockwork. Unless there’s a government event. He’s a very good swimmer, breaststroke and crawl, so he’s probably fit and strong. He walks to the corner over there, turns left, and walks in a straight line home. A ten-minute walk. After six minutes he passes a small vegetable patch, somebody’s private allotment. It’s dark and isolated. I’ll take him there. The only problem is we need a quick getaway. If he’s five minutes late his wife will come looking, and I mean five minutes, you know what the Germans are like. She’ll have her poodle with her, on a leash. Last thing at night they walk the dog.”

  “The good news is it’s a poodle,” Peter said. “So let’s say she really does come looking after five minutes. Ten minutes to the pool. A few minutes there looking for him. Less than twenty minutes to get him far away before the alarm goes out.”

  “Yes.”

  They cruised past the allotment. Two trees shedding leaves, ragged bushes, rows of vegetables, piles of wooden crates, a locked toolshed, a low fence. All bathed in the cold light of the moon, diffused by the tree’s thin foliage.

  “When does the owner work here?”

  “Weekends. Some mornings. No routine, but never in the dark. An elderly couple.”

  Yehuda turned the corner and Peter got out of the car to stroll back past the snatch site, while Yehuda drove slowly around the leafy neighborhood of low brick homes to pick Peter up outside the pool.

  “Okay, it’s perfect. You earned your money,” Peter said. “Where’s Bohlendorf now?”

  “In his office in the chancellery. We have eyes and ears there monitoring him.”

  “Ours?”

  “Theirs, who is one of ours.”

  “Good.”

  The next day they checked out the safe house, a rented farm alone at the end of a village lane outside Gönnersdorf, an hour south of Bonn, and went over the plan. The snatch cars would be abandoned at the edge of town and replaced by two faster Mercedes sedans. A sack would be over Bohlendorf’s head the whole time. The only person who would talk to him was a Ukrainian Jew who would use the name “Bogdan.” The only other language anybody would use was German. A video camera was ready to film Bohlendorf’s apology and confession: apology to the Ukrainian people and confession to being an East German spy. In the woods a deep hole was ready, covered with bracken and undergrowth, with a chemical powder, made in Ukraine, stored there to help the body decompose. Passports and air tickets were prepared. They would all drive overnight to Frankfurt and fly out of the country the next morning.

  The Mossad hit team was ready.

  But Peter still had his doubts. At the Office in Tel Aviv he had argued against killing Bohlendorf, who was a valuable future asset. Beyond that, he had felt he was channeling Moshe. “Egypt is not the threat we think it is,” he told Harel. “Nasser doesn’t want war with Israel, and even if he did, he’s no real military threat. And then there’s our guys on trial in Cairo, making us look bad. The last thing we want is another mess in Germany, especially now when they’re beginning to pay reparations. We need to keep Germany on Israel’s side.”

  “Listen to the politician,” Amnon Sela had said. “Thank you for the analysis, but we have better qualified people for that. All you need to do is your job: plan the hit, and wait for the order. Fortunately we have other people above your pay grade who make the decisions.”

  * * *

  “It’s just wrong,” Peter said to Diana in bed that night. “We’re playing God. Too many moving parts. Too much can go wrong. And knowing Harel, he may not even have told the prime minister.”

  “But you’ve got no choice, anyway.”

  That was true, and doubly so. An order was an order, but Harel had sweetened the deal. “Tell me again exactly what he said about Arie,” Diana said.

  “I told you. He didn’t say it in so many words but remember, he was head of Shin Bet for years. He knows domestic security backward. He said, ‘This police investigation, it is distracting you from your work here, it needs to be put on the back burner. I could possibly take care of that.’ Those were his exact words.”

  “Possibly? Can he do that?”

  “Little Isser? He can do anything.”

  “If he wants to.”

  “Exactly. If he wants to.”

  “But then you’ll owe him. He used the words ‘back burner’? He’ll always have that over you.”

  “Maybe that’s what he wants. That’s his specialty. But what else can I do? Arie’s my brother. God help me.”

  “What about that English policeman? He’s like a terrier.”

  “True, but it doesn’t work like that. He’s just a cog in the wheel. What counts is proteksia, who you know. It’s the head of Mossad talking to the chief of police. Old Palmach fighters over an orange juice. That kind of stuff. Probably at Dahlia’s kiosk.”

  * * *

  So Peter had dropped his objections and here he was, at 8:03 P.M. on a chilly moonless night, in the back of a Volkswagen transit
van, its tuned-up engine softly throbbing, waiting to glide slowly past a dark vegetable patch and stick a canvas bag over Kurt Bohlendorf’s head, which should happen in exactly three minutes.

  At that moment Mrs. Bohlendorf emerged from her house with her poodle, surprising the agent watching from across the street. In eight weeks of surveillance she had never come out early. She began to walk in the direction of her husband. Ulrika, the agent’s code name, her heart thumping, quickly crossed the street and overtook her. She apologized politely for startling her in the dark, and asked for directions to the train station. Which is the best bus? Anything to stall her. But the poodle was impatient and strained at the leash. Mrs. Bohlendorf apologized, saying Boo-Boo wants to meet his master. He’ll meet his maker if he doesn’t relax, Ulrika thought. “Or is there a bus all the way to Königswinter?” she asked. She knew her cover was blown, Mrs. Bohlendorf would tell the police about the strange woman who had stopped her and asked stupid questions just when her husband disappeared, but she had to delay her.

  “Thank you,” Ulrika said. “I’m a bit lost, it’s a long way from home,” and they both laughed while Boo-Boo urinated against a tree. “What a lovely dog,” Ulrike said. “How long have you had him?”

  A minute later, four hundred yards away, Bohlendorf turned onto the quiet street, walking briskly, carrying a small kit bag. Behind him a Volkswagen Beetle drove slowly, accelerating as Bohlendorf approached the allotment. The second vehicle, the Volkswagen van, idled by the allotment. Inside, Peter slid open the side door at the precise instant that a man with a mask erupted from behind a tree into Bohlendorf. His force and weight crashed into Bohlendorf’s ribs so hard the German gasped for breath. He toppled against the car’s chassis, his upper body fell inside the door’s opening, a powerful pair of hands wrapped around his head and pulled while Yehuda lifted his feet and pushed. Grabbing the dropped kit bag, Yehuda leapt into the van while Peter forced a sack over Bohlendorf’s head. Yehuda snapped handcuffs over Bohlendorf’s wrists and slid the door shut. It was so quick, the assault so aggressive and shocking, the first sound was Bohlendorf’s muted scream in a dank sack.

  Within six seconds the van had pulled away from the sidewalk, followed by the Beetle, and the two cars drove slowly up the street, passing Mrs. Bohlendorf and Ulrika deep in conversation.

  Yehuda said, “She made her.”

  Peter was looking back at the two women. “Yes. She must have come out early.”

  On the edge of town they swapped the Volkswagens for two Mercedes and sped away. That was the good part.

  It was at the farm that the operation fell apart.

  Just as the two Mercedes drove up to the farmhouse and the men were bundling the hooded victim out of the car, a boy and a screaming half-naked girl ran out from the trees toward one of the drivers, “Leopard,” code- named for his deep acne scars. The girl’s scream was cut short when she saw two men dragging a third man in a hood into the house. One hand flew to her mouth, the other covered her chest with her shirt. She looked from the door of the house to her shocked boyfriend, then back to the house entrance where the door had slammed shut.

  Leopard pulled her to him while the boy stared.

  The girl sobbed, “Help, please, a snake bit me.”

  “No it didn’t, dumbhead!” the boy shouted. “It just went over your foot.”

  Within minutes the young couple was tied up in the barn, gagged, their heads covered, trembling with fear, terrified by what they could hear of the excited conversation in German.

  “They saw my face,” Leopard was saying. “What do we do?”

  “Who are they? What are they doing here?” Peter said, returning from the house.

  “They were making out in the woods,” Yehuda said. “The silly kid saw a snake and ran for it.”

  “Scheisse.” Shit. Peter thumped the barn with his fist. Now what? They had to be out of here by two in the morning to make the first plane out of Frankfurt and they still had to deal with Bohlendorf. It was nine fifteen. His mind raced. Could it be good? The kids could be witnesses that we’re Ukrainian. Just leave them tied up till someone finds them? But they both saw Leopard’s face. And they heard us speak German. Can’t take the risk. Especially if Ulrika’s been blown.

  Yehuda cut in. “You know what we have to do, right?”

  “What?”

  “You know.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “We can’t take any chances.” Yehuda pointed with his chin at the barn. His body tensed. “We don’t have a choice.”

  Peter looked at Leopard, who nodded slowly back.

  “The wife will describe Ulrika to the police,” Yehuda said. “It was dark but they were close. And now these two.” He shook his head. “The cops will track our whole journey. No way we can leave them.”

  Another agent, code-named “Indian” because of his dark skin, nodded slowly too and looked away. “We’re screwed,” he said.

  What would Harel do? Peter walked quickly away from the group, went into the barn, and looked at the boy and girl sagging on the chairs, bound, gagged, and hooded. Poor bastards, he thought. All they wanted was a quickie in the woods, and now look at them. He went back into the house where Bogdan was leaning into Bohlendorf’s face, poking him with a knife. It was his job to persuade the Nazi to talk on camera. He was using the information Ulrika had given him from her surveillance: Boo-Boo would die. His wife would die, after she was raped. Read the script on camera. Or else.

  Peter’s mind was racing, calculating. It’s already 9:20, a sleepy small village, there’s probably a lovers’ lane nearby in the woods. We don’t have much time, maybe an hour, before the boy and girl would be missed. This place could be swarming with worried families within the hour.

  What would Harel do? What would he want? Peter felt himself becoming breathless. He went outside, back into the barn, looked at the boy and girl. They were both crying.

  Outside again. “Well,” Yehuda said. “What do we do?” They were all looking at him, the whites of their eyes gleaming in the dim moonlight. Birds tweeted, leaves rustled in the wind.

  It’s no good thinking of what Harel would do; he isn’t here, Peter thought. I am and I’m in charge. Decide now. Lives depend on this, and much more. If they do this and get caught, there would be arrests, kidnap and murder charges, headlines, a diplomatic disaster for Israel at the worst possible time.

  Damn. Exactly what he’d warned against.

  But one thing he knew for certain.

  Hell would freeze over before he killed those two kids.

  But if there were witnesses they couldn’t kill Bohlendorf either.

  A minute passed before Peter spoke, slowly. “Right, this is what we do. Get Bohlendorf back in the car. When we’re ready to roll, Yehuda, take the hoods off the kids and loosen their ropes. In such a way that it’ll take half an hour to free themselves. Keep them gagged so they can’t yell. Got it?”

  Yehuda saw this was not a time to argue. Peter was the agent-in-charge. Change of plan.

  “Got it,” he said.

  “Leopard, get everyone into the cars, load up everything, don’t leave a trace. Especially the camera gear. We only have minutes. Let’s go.”

  A thought occurred to him. Bohlendorf would still have no idea who they were or why he’d been taken, although with his record he’d make some pretty good guesses. Either way he knows he’s cooked. If he could he’d make a run for it. To safety: East Germany.

  Minutes later they were all on the road, racing back to Bonn. They wound through the traffic as fast as they could without attracting attention. Near the main train station one car dropped a tightly bound, gagged, and furiously struggling Kurt Bohlendorf deep in a dark alley and sped away. The other car waited nearby while Peter found a pay phone and called his top contact in the defense ministry.

  “Günther, sorry if I woke you up. Listen carefully. Surprise, surprise. Adenauer’s chief of protocol, Kurt Bohlendorf, is an East German spy. You
can find him by the trash cans in the middle of the alley at the corner of Meckenheimerallee and Quantiusstrasse. He fell out with his handlers. Get there now. I’ll speak to you tomorrow.”

  What he didn’t say was, he’d talk to him tomorrow from Tel Aviv.

  * * *

  An Office driver brought Peter and Yehuda straight from the airport to Ben Yehuda Street, where they were fielding urgent demands from the foreign ministry and Israel’s embassy in Bonn to know what had just happened in their front yard. The German Chancellery was bombarding the Israeli ambassador with furious questions about why Germany’s head of protocol was tied up like a chicken in an alley, claiming he had been kidnapped by Israelis pretending to be Ukrainians. The German Defense Ministry insinuated Bohlendorf was an East German spy but had no evidence. What the hell’s going on?

  “Well, you really screwed that one up,” Sela said as they waited in the conference room. “Harel is on his way here. There’s a diplomatic shitstorm, and just on the day Egypt announced a trial date for the Aman clowns in Cairo. Well done. Mighty Mossad. Mighty Mouse, more like it.”

  Peter looked at Yehuda and shook his head. Amnon Sela had been an undistinguished field operative in Paris and Rome, who had nevertheless been promoted to European section chief. “You know, Amnon,” Peter said. “You’re so scared I’ll take your job. Why is that? Why don’t you just relax, for once? When did you start being so afraid? It’s boring. You’re supposed to support the men in the field, not work against us.”

  “You’re full of it. I’m not working against you, you’re…”

  “Enough,” Harel said, tight-faced, closing the door behind him. “Nesher, what happened?”

  Yehuda broke in. “Peter made the right decision.”

  Peter looked at him with a raised eyebrow. Sela would not forgive that. “Sir…” Peter began, and gave a blow-by-blow account of the plan and what went wrong. Ten minutes later he concluded, saying, “I had to decide on the spot. I had to avoid a real disaster, and I think I managed to salvage something. And please let me emphasize that I took the decision, it is my responsibility, and mine only.”