The Heist (24 page)

The portion of the Western Wall visible from the plaza was 187 feet wide and 62 feet high. The actual western retaining wall of the Temple Mount plateau, however, was much larger, descending 42 feet below the plaza and stretching more than a quarter mile into the Muslim Quarter, where it was concealed behind residential structures. After years of politically and religiously charged archaeological excavations, it was now possible to walk nearly the entire length of the wall via the Western Wall Tunnel, an underground passageway running from the plaza to the Via Dolorosa.

The entrance to the tunnel was on the left side of the plaza, not far from Wilson’s Arch. Gabriel slipped through the modern glass doorway and, trailed by his bodyguards, descended a flight of aluminum stairs into the basement of time. A newly paved walkway ran along the base of the wall. He followed it past the massive Herodian ashlars until he arrived at a section of the tunnel complex that was concealed by a curtain of opaque plastic. Beyond the curtain was a rectangular excavation pit where a single figure, a small man of late middle age, picked at the soil in a cone of soft white light. He seemed oblivious to Gabriel’s presence, which was not the case. It would be easier to surprise a squirrel than Eli Lavon.

Another moment elapsed before Lavon looked up and smiled. He had wispy, unkempt hair and a bland, almost featureless face that even the most gifted portrait artist would have struggled to capture on canvas. Eli Lavon was a ghost of a man, a chameleon who was easily overlooked and soon forgotten. Shamron had once said he could disappear while shaking your hand. It wasn’t far from the truth.

Gabriel had first worked with Lavon on Wrath of God, the secret Israeli intelligence operation to hunt down and kill the perpetrators of the Munich Olympics massacre. In the Hebrew-based lexicon of the team, Lavon had been an
ayin
, a tracker and surveillance artist. For three years he had stalked the terrorists of Black September across Europe and the Middle East, often in dangerously close proximity. The work left him with numerous stress disorders, including a notoriously fickle stomach that troubled him to this day.

When the unit disbanded in 1975, Lavon settled in Vienna, where he opened a small investigative unit called Wartime Claims and Inquiries. Operating on a shoestring budget, he managed to track down millions of dollars’ worth of looted Holocaust assets and played a significant role in prying a multibillion-dollar settlement from the banks of Switzerland. The work won him few admirers in Vienna, and in 2003 a bomb exploded in his office, killing two young female employees. Heartbroken, he returned to Israel to pursue his first love, which was archaeology. He now served as an adjunct professor at Hebrew University and regularly took part in digs around the country. He had spent the better part of two years sifting through the soil in the Western Wall Tunnel.

“Who are your little friends?” he asked, glancing at the bodyguards standing along the edge of the excavation pit.

“I found them wandering lost in the plaza.”

“They’re not making a mess, are they?”

“They wouldn’t dare.”

Lavon looked down and resumed his work.

“What have you got there?” asked Gabriel.

“A bit of loose change.”

“Who dropped it?”

“Someone who was upset by the fact the Persians were about to conquer Jerusalem. It was obvious he was in a hurry.”

Lavon reached out and adjusted the angle of his work lamp. The bottom of the trench shone with embedded pieces of gold.

“What are they?” asked Gabriel.

“Thirty-six gold coins from the Byzantine era and a large medallion with a menorah. They prove there were Jews living on this spot before the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in 638. For most biblical archaeologists, this would be the find of a lifetime. But not for me.” Lavon looked at Gabriel and added, “Or you, either.”

Gabriel glanced over his shoulder at the ashlars of the Wall. A year earlier, in a secret chamber 167 feet beneath the surface of the Temple Mount, he and Lavon had discovered twenty-two pillars from Solomon’s Temple of Jerusalem, thus proving beyond doubt that the ancient Jewish sanctuary, described in Kings and Chronicles, had in fact existed. They had also discovered a massive bomb that, had it detonated, would have brought down the entire sacred plateau. The pillars now stood in a high-security exhibit at the Israel Museum. One had required special cleaning before it could be displayed, for it was stained with Lavon’s blood.

“I got a call from Uzi last night,” Lavon said after a moment. “He told me you might be stopping by.”

“Did he tell you why?”

“He mentioned something about a lost Caravaggio and a company called LXR Investments. He said you were interested in acquiring it, along with the rest of Evil Incorporated.”

“Can it be done?”

“There’s only so much you can do from the outside. Eventually, you’re going to need help from someone who can provide the keys to the kingdom.”

“So we’ll find him.”

“We?” When Gabriel made no reply, Lavon leaned down and began picking at the soil around one of the ancient coins. “What do you need me to do?”

“Exactly what you’re doing right now,” replied Gabriel. “But I want you to use a computer and a balance sheet instead of a hand trowel and a brush.”

“These days, I prefer a trowel and a brush.”

“I know, Eli, but I can’t do it without you.”

“There’s not going to be any rough stuff, is there?”

“No, Eli, of course not.”

“You always say that, Gabriel.”

“And?”

“There’s always rough stuff.”

Gabriel reached down and disconnected the lamp from its power source. Lavon worked in the darkness for a moment longer. Then he rose to his feet, brushed his hands against his trousers, and climbed out of the pit.

A lifelong bachelor, Lavon kept a small apartment in the Talpiot district of Jerusalem, just off the Hebron Road. They stopped there long enough for him to change into clean clothing and then headed down the Bab al-Wad to King Saul Boulevard. After entering the building “black,” they made their way down three flights of stairs and followed a windowless corridor to a doorway marked 456C. The room on the other side had once been a dumping ground for obsolete computers and worn-out furniture, often used by the night staff as a clandestine meeting place for romantic trysts. It was now known throughout King Saul Boulevard only as Gabriel’s Lair.

The keyless cipher lock was set to the numeric version of Gabriel’s date of birth, reputedly the Office’s most closely guarded secret. With Lavon peering over his shoulder, he punched the code into the keypad and pushed open the door. Waiting inside was Dina Sarid, a small, dark-haired woman who carried herself with an air of early widowhood. A human database, she was capable of reciting the time, place, perpetrators, and casualty toll of every act of terrorism committed against Israeli and Western targets. Dina had once told Gabriel that she knew more about the terrorists than they knew about themselves. And Gabriel had believed her.

“Where are the others?” he asked.

“Stuck in Personnel.”

“What’s the holdup?”

“Apparently, the division heads are in revolt.” Dina paused, then added, “That’s what happens to an intelligence service when word gets around that the chief isn’t long for this world.”

“Maybe I should go upstairs and have a word with the division heads.”

“Give it a few minutes.”

“How bad has it been?”

“I’ve put together a list of al-Qaeda operatives who’ve set up shop next door in Syria—serious global jihadists who need to be taken out of circulation permanently. And guess what happens every time I propose an operation?”

“Nothing.”

Dina nodded slowly. “We’re frozen in place,” she said. “We’re treading water at a time we can least afford it.”

“Not any more, Dina.”

Just then, the door swung open, and Rimona Stern entered the room. Mikhail Abramov came loping in next, followed a few minutes later by Yaakov Rossman, who looked as though he hadn’t slept in a month. Soon after there appeared a pair of all-purpose field hands named Mordecai and Oded, followed lastly by Yossi Gavish, a tall, balding figure dressed in corduroy and tweed. Yossi was a top officer in Research, which is how the Office referred to its analytical division. Born in the Golders Green section of London, he had studied at Oxford and still spoke Hebrew with a pronounced English accent.

Within the corridors and conference rooms of King Saul Boulevard, the eight men and women gathered in the subterranean room were known by the code name Barak, the Hebrew word for lightning, for their uncanny ability to gather and strike quickly. They were a service within a service, a team of operatives without equal or fear. Throughout their existence, it had sometimes been necessary to admit outsiders into their midst—a British investigative journalist, a Russian billionaire, the daughter of a man they killed—but never before had they allowed another agent of the Office to join their fraternity. Therefore, they were all surprised when, at the stroke of ten, Bella Navot appeared in the doorway. She was dressed for the boardroom in a gray pantsuit and was clutching a batch of files to her breast. She stood in the threshold for a moment, as if waiting for an invitation to enter, before settling wordlessly next to Yossi at one of the communal worktables.

If the team was made uneasy by Bella’s presence, they gave no sign of it as Gabriel rose to his feet and walked over to the last chalkboard in all of King Saul Boulevard. On it was written three words:
BLOOD NEVER SLEEPS
. He erased them with a single swipe of his hand and in their place wrote three letters:
LXR
. Then he recounted for the team the remarkable series of events that had hastened their reunion, beginning with the murder of a British spy turned art smuggler named Jack Bradshaw and ending with the note Bradshaw had left for Gabriel in his vault at the Geneva Freeport. In death, Bradshaw had tried to atone for his sins by giving Gabriel the identity of the man who was acquiring stolen paintings by the truckload: the murderous ruler of Syria. He had also supplied Gabriel with the name of the front company the ruler had used for his purchases: LXR Investments of Luxembourg. Surely LXR was but a small star in a galaxy of global wealth, much of which was carefully hidden beneath layers of shells and front companies. But a network of wealth, like a network of terrorists, had to have a skilled operational mastermind in order to function. The ruler had entrusted his family’s money to Kemel al-Farouk, the bodyguard of the ruler’s father, the henchman who tortured and killed at the regime’s behest. But Kemel couldn’t manage the money himself, not with the NSA and its partners monitoring his every move. Somewhere out there was a man of trust—a lawyer, a banker, a relative—who had the power to move those assets at will. They were going to use LXR as a way to track him down. And Bella Navot was going to guide them every step of the way.

T
HEY STARTED THEIR SEARCH NOT
with the son but with the father: the man who had ruled Syria from 1970 until his death of a heart attack in 2000. He was born in the Ansariya Mountains of northwestern Syria in October 1930, in the village of Qurdaha. Like the other villages in the region, Qurdaha belonged to the Alawites, followers of a tiny, persecuted branch of Shia Islam whom the majority Sunnis regarded as heretics. Qurdaha had no mosque or church and not a single café or shop, but rain fell upon the land thirty days each year, and there was a mineral spring in a nearby cave that the villagers called ‘Ayn Zarqa. The ninth of eleven children, he lived in a two-room stone house with a small front yard of beaten earth and an adjoining mud patch for the animals. His grandfather, a minor village notable who was good with his fists and a gun, was known as al-Wahhish, the Wild Man, because he had once thrashed a traveling Turkish wrestler. His father could put a bullet through a cigarette paper at a hundred paces.

In 1944 he left Qurdaha to attend school in the coastal town of Latakia. There he became active in politics, joining the new Arab Baath Socialist Party, a secular movement that sought to end Western influence in the Middle East through pan-Arab socialism. In 1951 he enrolled in a military academy in Aleppo, a traditional route for an Alawite trying to escape the bonds of mountain poverty, and by 1964 he was in command of the Syrian air force. After a Baathist coup in 1966, he became Syria’s defense minister, a post he held during Syria’s disastrous war with Israel in 1967, when it lost the Golan Heights. Despite the catastrophic failure of his forces, he would be the president of Syria just three years later. In a sign of things to come, he referred to the bloodless coup that brought him to power as a “corrective movement.”

His rise ended a long cycle of political instability in Syria, but at a high cost to the Syrian people and the rest of the Middle East. A client of the Soviet Union, his regime was among the most dangerous in the region. He supported radical elements of the Palestinian movement—Abu Nidal operated with impunity from Damascus for years—and equipped his military with the latest in Soviet tanks, fighters, and air defenses. Syria itself became a vast prison, a place where fax machines were outlawed and a misplaced word about the ruler would result in a trip to the Mezzeh, the notorious hilltop prison in western Damascus. Fifteen separate security services spied on the Syrian people and on one another. All were controlled by Alawites, as was the Syrian military. An elaborate cult of personality rose around the ruler and his family. His face, with its domed forehead and sickly pallor, loomed over every square and hung on the walls of every public building in the country. His peasant mother was revered almost as a saint.

Within a decade of his ascent, however, much of the country’s Sunni majority was no longer content to be ruled over by an Alawite peasant from Qurdaha. Bombs exploded regularly in Damascus, and in June 1979 a member of the Muslim Brotherhood killed at least fifty Alawite cadets in the dining hall of the Aleppo military academy. A year later, Islamic militants hurled a pair of grenades at the ruler during a diplomatic function in Damascus—at which point the ruler’s hot-tempered brother declared all-out war on the Brotherhood and its Sunni Muslim supporters. Among his first acts was to dispatch units of his Defense Companies, the guardians of the regime, to the Palmyra desert prison. An estimated eight hundred political prisoners were slaughtered in their cells.