by By Jon Land
“Until you found out he was alive, living as Paul Hessler. How?”
“A dying German who gave me the names of the other three true impersonators lived in the same camp as Hessler. He claimed he witnessed my father shoot Hessler after they had exchanged clothes.”
“He saw the same thing Weiss saw?”
“Only he got it right.”
Danielle hesitated. “And the second list of names you gave Vorsky ...”
“Fit the same profile as the three I was sure of. Most had already been investigated and cleared.”
“Like my father.” Danielle had expected an argument, continued when Mundt didn’t offer one. “So what is it you’re after? Revenge? Compensation?”
“I honestly don’t know. I don’t think I can decide until I’m face to face with him. I just know I have to do this, that nothing else matters.”
Danielle found the irony between them striking: She would do anything to save her child, while Mundt had done everything to find his father. “It doesn’t bother you that Hessler has long been the state of Israel’s greatest benefactor?”
“I suppose he was after redemption, absolution. You know something? I think Karl Mundt actually became Paul Hessler. He didn’t just live as a Jew and an Israeli; he was one. One of you,” Hans Mundt added, staring at Danielle.
Danielle shivered, finding the strength at last to pose the question that had brought her this far. “What about my father?”
“What did Anna tell you?”
“There was the issue of an account Hessler opened in my father’s name, but nothing else. My father was investigated and cleared by the Gatekeepers.”
“Not cleared—filed.”
“What does that mean?”
“Allowed to live pending further investigation.”
One of her shoes slipped on a water-filled rut and her foot nearly came out of her shoe. “You believe my father was a Nazi war criminal, just like yours.”
“The evidence is too strong to ignore.”
“Not enough for the Gatekeepers.”
“The question is whether it’s enough for you, Barnea.”
“He was a great man!”
“So, apparently, is my father.”
Something pricked Danielle’s spine. “How did Anna know all this? About you, about me?”
Hans Mundt turned away from the scattered remnants of the castle that had saved his father’s life. “From Abraham Vorsky. You said so yourself before.”
“You’re a fool, Mundt. You played right into their hands by coming back to Poland.”
“Anna Krieger didn’t know what I found here.”
“But Vorsky did and he would have told her! They both knew you would be coming back here to prove your case, after you rescued me.”
Mundt’s eyes widened, his face reddening as he spun around toward the ground-level trees rimming most of the hilltop. Pushed back his coat and went for his pistol.
“No!” Danielle screamed.
She barreled into Mundt and took him to the ground just as the first gunshots split the crisp air, spraying them with dirt.
* * * *
CHAPTER 73
I
s there something you’re not telling me, Inspector?” Colonel al-Asi asked Ben before they entered the former Israeli military barracks that had been transformed into Jericho’s lone jail.
“If you need to ask, you know there is.”
Al-Asi stopped before the door. “Does this concern Pakad Barnea?”
Ben couldn’t help but smile. “No matter how much credit I give you, Colonel, it’s never enough.”
“I only hope that whatever is going on it has nothing to do with the visit the two of you made to Pakad Barnea’s doctor last week.”
Ben shook his head in amazement. “Is there ever a time you’re not watching me, Colonel?”
“I watch everyone, Inspector.”
“Enemies only, I thought.”
“Friends are more important.”
“But you don’t know what happened inside the office.”
“My surveillance stops at the door.” Al-Asi turned his gaze back toward the Winnebago parked across the street. Here on the outskirts of Jericho, he didn’t have to worry about its considerable size blocking the narrow streets. Inside his wife and youngest children were watching another animated video—a present last Christmas from Ben. “But that doesn’t mean my concern does,” he resumed.
“Thank you, Colonel.”
Officially, maintenance of the jail fell under the jurisdiction of the Tanzim, Arafat’s paramilitary organization. But al-Asi had not called ahead to alert them of his coming. Ben always enjoyed seeing the shock on an official’s face when al-Asi appeared without warning and tonight was no exception. The duty officer jumped out of his chair and knocked over his cup of tea, cupping his hands beneath his desk to catch the spilled liquid.
“What can I do for you, Colonel?” the officer asked, as tea pooled on the floor despite his most determined efforts.
Seconds later, al-Asi and Ben were being escorted to a cell on the third floor where the Palestinian soccer star Abdel Sidr was incarcerated.
“He is the only one up here, sidi,” the duty officer said nervously to al-Asi. “For obvious reasons.”
“Word of Sidr’s arrest has still not been made public,” the colonel explained to Ben. “He is a folk hero, after all.”
The duty officer unlocked the heavy wooden door and yanked it open. The bottom scratched across the floor, resisting. When the door would move no further, the duty officer graciously motioned for al-Asi and Ben to enter.
“Leave us,” the colonel said.
Ben heard the man’s heels clacking briskly down the hallway and watched as Abdel Sidr sat up on the stone cot built into the side wall.
“You know who I am?” al-Asi asked him.
Sidr looked at al-Asi as if Ben weren’t in the room. “Everyone knows who you are.”
“Then listen closely to what I am about to tell you. You have refused to answer questions thus far. That must change. Cooperate fully with us today and there may be a way I can get you out of this. I’m not promising anything, mind you, but I am in a position to influence matters as best I can. You may even be back playing for the team again before next week is out. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sidi.”
“Very good. Now, I believe you’ve already met Inspector Bayan Kamal of our police.”
The soccer star finally acknowledged Ben with a passing glance.
“Inspector Kamal,” al-Asi continued, “has some questions for you. You will answer each one fully and truthfully. You will not hesitate and you will hold nothing back. Comply and rest assured my influence will be applied on your behalf.” The colonel tilted his head toward Ben, yielding the floor. “Inspector.”
“When did Mahmoud Fasil hire you?”
“I saw him for the first time when he hugged me on the field after the game.”
“Someone else made the arrangements, then.”
Sidr nodded, his back against the stone wall of the cell. “A few days before the game. In a bar where the members of the team are invited to drink for free. I was told someone would approach me after the final whistle and I should act as naturally as possible. But I didn’t realize—”
“What were your instructions regarding the disc Fasil passed on to you?”
Abdel Sidr didn’t hesitate. “I was to take it with me to Athens.”
“Athens?”
“We have a game there the day after tomorrow. We are always taken straight to the plane at the airport in Gaza. They never bring us through the security checkpoint.”
“Go on.”
“Tomorrow we—the team, I mean—were to sightsee in Athens. I was to bring the disc with me and separate myself from the rest of the group at the National Museum. I would then be approached by someone who asks me for my autograph. When I finish signing, he tells me to keep the pen and I hand over the disc.”
> “Why have you not told this to anyone before?”
“I was never asked, sidi.”
Al-Asi looked uneasy, almost embarrassed, for the first time Ben could remember. “I’m sorry, Inspector. Please continue.”
“You don’t know who this person will be who’s supposed to contact you?”
“He will know me.”
“How?”
“We are to wear warm-up suits with our name and number on them, Inspector.”
Ben nodded, looked back at al-Asi. “I’m finished here. Let’s go.”
“Not just yet,” the colonel said. “I have another question for the prisoner before we leave.” He focused his gaze unblinkingly on Abdel Sidr. Ben had seen that look before, as dangerous as a bullet. “Why did you do it?”
Sidr shrugged his muscular shoulders. “We are not paid to play soccer, sidi.”
* * * *
N
obody knows Abdel Sidr has been jailed,” Ben repeated thoughtfully when they were back outside.
“His teammates probably, but we are not allowing them to talk to the media.”
“So the courier has no reason to believe Sidr won’t be showing up at the National Museum in Athens to hand over the disc as planned.”
Al-Asi looked perplexed. “You want Sidr to stick to the original plan?”
“Not exactly, Colonel.”
* * * *
CHAPTER 74
U
nder thecircumstances, I thought we should meet,” Abraham Vorsky, former head of Mossad, said to Anna Krieger, head of the Gatekeepers.
“Why?” she asked him. She had refused his offer to take the chair next to the one where Vorsky was seated, preferring to stand. Her wig clung tightly to her scalp and the pancake makeup she had applied to her face, made especially for burn victims, felt like a Halloween mask she dared not remove.
“Because this situation is complicated.”
“Not to us.”
“My point exactly.”
They had met in eastern Istanbul at the Hotel Princess Ortakoy in Ortakoy Square overlooking the Bosphorus. The view through the lobby windows included the vast Feriye palaces from Byzantine times and the great columns of the Bosphorus Bridge. In centuries past the network of canals winding back and forth to the strait had been the only way to travel amidst the villages that lined it. Though connecting roads had long since been added, the character of this famed section of Istanbul still relied on the water-way that had once been cluttered with boats carrying both people and merchandise. The lifeline of a city for which water was like blood.
The furniture in the Princess Ortakoy’s lobby looked more appropriate for a museum’s baroque period display than a hotel. Abraham Vorsky’s chair and the one he offered to Anna Krieger were salvaged from the Ciragan Palace after it was badly damaged by fire in the late nineteenth century. That palace, now fully restored as a hotel itself, no longer needed the chairs long since appropriated by the Hotel Princess Ortakoy.
“If Hans Mundt’s suspicions about Paul Hessler are correct,” Vorsky continued, “your people will act.”
Anna stood more erectly. “You called me here to tell me what my people are going to do?”
“But this time you cannot let them.”
“You intend to stop me?”
“I have my orders.”
“And I have my duty.”
Abraham Vorsky leaned back, let his shoulders melt into the soft fabric of the antique chair. It was hard looking up at Anna. The thick makeup took the sheen from her flesh and gave her a ghostlike pallor. Vorsky tried not to think what lay beneath that coating. Instead he remembered the tall woman looming over him as a beautiful little girl, full of questions. He remembered the aftermath of the explosion that had claimed the lives of her parents and nearly burned Anna alive, of inquiring as to what would become of her.
“You are too young to be a relic like me, Anna,” he said finally, hoping to sound convincing.
“You worked with my father.”
“And your mother,” Vorsky told her. “They provided considerable assistance to us in those days. But those days are over.”
“Not so long as men like Hessler are still out there. Not so long as a single one of them is left alive, enticing others to follow.”
Vorsky wondered what he could do to conciliate the tall woman. He thought of taking her hand, but she stood too far away for him to reach. “It is time to let go, Anna. For both of us.”
“You didn’t feel that way when Mundt came to you with his list of names. You acted within twenty-four hours.”
“Those names brought it all back to me, made me feel it was fifty years ago and I was still tracking down the killers of my parents with the help of yours.”
“You never found those men, did you?”
“No,” Vorsky said regretfully.
“And yet you tell me it is time to let go.”
“Of Paul Hessler, anyway. Your mother and father would have done so.”
Anna’s features flared, emotion stretching her skin in unaccustomed lines. “Because he has bought his penance, his atonement, with billions of dollars of gifts and donations? Because he has lived so long as a Jew, you are willing to accept he has become one?”
Vorsky shrugged. “He was just a guard, not one of the monsters.”
“They were all monsters.”
Vorsky finally stood up, pushing hard on the old chair’s arms to rise. “The decision is not mine alone, Anna.”
“But you agree with it, don’t you?”
“Under the circumstances, I have no choice.”
“So they sent you here to stop me.”
“I came to stop you any way I can.”
“What about Mundt, will you stop him as well?”
“Once we find him, yes.”
“And Barnea, the Israeli detective he rescued?”
Vorsky nodded. “If she has joined him.”
“You would destroy me and one of your own to protect a man like Paul Hessler—or, should I say, Karl Mundt?”
“It’s the way things are, I’m afraid. I’m sorry, Anna.”
She made no move toward him. “I’m sorry, too.”
* * * *
A
nna watched through the lobby window as Abraham Vorsky’s guards, unseen during their meeting, piled into the car with him. The car drove off, heading along the shore toward the bridge where it would pass to the European side of the Bosphorus en route to central Istanbul.
She barely blinked when Vorsky’s car erupted in a burst of flames that sent burnt embers and charred chips of metal raining into the waters below. A secondary blast, the fuel tank probably, sent the husk spinning into the air. It landed off the road, keeling over the rail that separated the street from the sea.
Anna turned to see the guards who had accompanied her here standing rigidly behind her. “Contact the others,” she ordered. “We will meet them in the United States.”
Her cellular phone rang and Anna grasped it anxiously. The number was changed electronically almost daily and she had given the latest to only one other person.
“It’s done,” reported the leader of the team Anna had sent to Poland.
* * * *
* * * *
CHAPTER 75
B
en Kamal entered the National Archaeological Museum in Athens closely behind the Palestinian national soccer team. He stayed near enough to them to appear perhaps part of the group, yet far enough back so none of them would notice him.
It was a cloudy, rainy day, which allowed him to cover Abdel Sidr’s warm-up suit with a long coat. The warm-up suit had the star’s name and number embroidered upon the shiny blue fabric.
“I do not think this is a good idea,” Colonel Nabril al-Asi had cautioned yesterday outside the jail in Jericho after Ben explained his plan.
“Why not? Since Sidr’s arrest has remained secret, it’s safe to assume the courier he was to meet in Athens has no knowledge of it.”
