The Heist (27 page)

The first twenty-four hours of her search produced nothing of value. Then, on a hunch, she dug out her old files on an incident that had occurred in Syria in February 1982. Under Bella’s direction, the Office had produced two definitive accounts of the incident—a highly classified document for use inside Israel’s intelligence community, and an unclassified white paper that was released to the public through the Foreign Ministry. Both versions of the report contained the eyewitness testimony of a young girl, but Bella had withheld her name in both documents in order to protect her identity. Deep within her personal research files, however, was a transcript of the girl’s original statement, and at the end of the transcript was her name. Two minutes later, breathless after sprinting from Research to Room 456C, she placed the document triumphantly in front of Gabriel. “It’s Hama,” she said. “The poor thing was at Hama.”

“How much do we really know about Waleed al-Siddiqi?”

“Enough to know he’s the one we’re looking for, Uzi.”

“Humor me, Gabriel.”

Navot removed his eyeglasses and massaged the bridge of his nose, something he always did when he was not certain how to proceed. He was seated at his large glass desk, with one foot resting on the blotter. Behind him an orange sun was sinking slowly toward the surface of the Mediterranean. Gabriel watched it for a moment. It had been a long time since he had seen the sun.

“He’s an Alawite,” he said at last, “originally from Aleppo. When he was working in Damascus, he billed himself as a relative of the ruling family. As you might expect, there’s no mention of his blood ties in any of Bank Weber’s brochures.”

“How is he related?”

“Apparently, he’s a distant cousin of the mother, which is significant. The mother is the one who told her son to come down like a ton of bricks on the protesters.”

“Sounds as though you’ve been hanging around with my wife.”

“I have.”

Navot smiled. “So Waleed al-Siddiqi is a charter member of Evil Incorporated?”

“That’s what I’m saying, Uzi.”

“How did he make his money?”

“He started his career in Syria’s state-run pharmaceutical industry, which is also significant.”

“Because Syria’s pharmaceutical industry is an extension of its chemical and biological weapons program.”

Gabriel nodded slowly. “Al-Siddiqi made certain that a good portion of the industry’s profits flowed directly into the coffers of the family. He also made certain that Western firms wishing do business in Syria paid for the privilege in the form of bribes and commissions. Along the way al-Siddiqi became very rich.” Gabriel paused, then added, “Rich enough to buy a bank.”

Navot frowned. “When did al-Siddiqi leave Syria?”

“Four years ago.”

“Just as the Arab Spring was in full bloom,” Navot pointed out.

“It was no coincidence. Al-Siddiqi was looking for a safe place to manage the family fortune. And he found one when a small bank in Linz got into trouble during the Great Recession.”

“You think the money is being held in accounts at Bank Weber?”

“A portion of it,” answered Gabriel. “And he’s controlling the rest by using Bank Weber as his calling card.”

“Is Herr Weber in on it?”

“I’m not sure.”

“What about the girl?”

“No,” said Gabriel. “She doesn’t know.”

“How can you be certain?”

“Because a kissing cousin of the Syrian ruler would never trust a girl from Hama to be his account manager.”

Navot lowered his feet to the floor and laid his heavy forearms upon the desktop. The glass seemed in danger of shattering beneath the strain of his powerful body.

“So what do you have in mind?” he asked.

“She’s looking for a friend,” replied Gabriel. “I’m going to give her one.”

“Boy or girl?”

“Girl,” said Gabriel. “Definitely a girl.”

“Who are you planning to use?”

Gabriel answered.

“She’s an analyst.”

“She speaks fluent German and Arabic.”

“What kind of approach are you thinking about?”

“Hard, I’m afraid.”

“And the flag?”

“I can assure you it won’t be blue and white.”

Navot smiled. When he had worked in the field as a
katsa
, false-flag operations were his specialty. He routinely posed as an officer of German intelligence when recruiting spies from Arab countries or from within the ranks of terrorist organizations. Convincing an Arab to betray his country, or his cause, was easier if the Arab didn’t know he was working for the State of Israel.

“What are you planning to do with Bella?” he asked.

“She wants to go into the field. I told her it was your decision.”

“The wife of the chief doesn’t go into the field.”

“She’s going to be disappointed.”

“I’m used to it.”

“What about you, Uzi?”

“What about me?”

“I could use your help for the recruitment.”

“Why?”

“Because your grandparents lived in Vienna before the war, and you speak German like an Austrian goatherd.”

“It’s better than that dreadful Berlin accent of yours.”

Navot looked up at his video wall, where a family in the besieged city of Homs was preparing a meal of boiled weeds. It was the only thing left in the city to eat.

“There’s one other thing you need to think about,” he said. “If you make even the smallest mistake, Waleed al-Siddiqi is going to chop that girl to pieces and throw her into the Danube.”

“Actually,” replied Gabriel, “he’ll let the boys have a little fun with her first. Then he’ll kill her.”

Navot lowered his gaze from the screen and looked at Gabriel seriously. “You sure you want to go through with this?”

“Absolutely.”

“I was hoping that would be your answer.”

“What are we going to do about Bella?”

“Take her with you. Or better yet, send her straight to Damascus.” Navot looked at the video wall again and shook his head slowly. “This damn war would be over in a week.”

Later that evening, the
Guardian
of London published a report accusing the Syrian regime of utilizing torture and murder on an industrial scale. The report was based on a trove of photographs that had been smuggled out of Syria by the man whose job it had been to take them. They depicted the bodies of thousands of people, young men mainly, who had died while in the custody of their government. Some of the men had been shot. Some bore the marks of hanging or electrocution. Others had no eyes. Nearly all looked like human skeletons.

It was against this backdrop that the team carried out their final preparations. From Housekeeping they acquired two safe properties—a small apartment in the center of Linz and a large tawny-colored villa on the shore of the Attersee, twenty-five miles to the south. Transport saw to the cars and motorbikes; Identity, to the passports. Gabriel had several from which to choose, but in the end he settled on Jonathan Albright, an American who worked for something called Markham Capital Advisers of Greenwich, Connecticut. Albright was no ordinary financial consultant. He had recently smuggled a Russian spy from St. Petersburg to the West. And before that he inserted a shipment of sabotaged centrifuges into Iran’s nuclear supply chain.

When the preparations were complete, the team members left King Saul Boulevard and headed to their assigned “jump sites,” a constellation of safe flats in the Tel Aviv area where Office field operatives assumed their new identities before leaving Israel for their missions. As usual, they traveled to their destination at different times, and by different routes, so as not to arouse the suspicion of the local immigration authorities. Mordecai and Oded were the first to arrive in Austria; Dina Sarid, the last. Her passport identified her as Ingrid Roth, a native of Munich. She spent a single night at the villa on the Attersee. Then, at noon the following day, she took possession of the apartment in Linz. That evening, while standing in the window of the cramped sitting room, she saw an old Volvo rattle to a stop outside the building on the opposite side of the street. The woman who emerged from behind the wheel was Jihan Nawaz.

Dina snapped Jihan’s photograph and dispatched it securely to Room 465C, where Gabriel was working late, with no company other than Bella’s files on the massacre at Hama. He left King Saul Boulevard a few minutes after ten and, bypassing normal Office procedures, returned to his apartment in Narkiss Street to spend his last night in Israel with his wife. She was sleeping when he arrived; he slipped into bed quietly and placed his hand atop her abdomen. She stirred, gave him a drowsy kiss, and then drifted back to sleep. And in the morning, when she woke, he was gone.

T
HE MANY VERSIONS OF
G
ABRIEL
’
S
face were well known to the security services of Austria, so Travel thought it best to route him through Munich instead. He sailed easily through passport control as a smiling, moneyed American and then rode an airport coach to the long-term parking lot, where Transport had left an untraceable Audi A7. The key was hidden in a magnetic box in the left-rear wheel well. Gabriel removed it with a swipe of his hand and, crouching, searched the undercarriage for any evidence of a bomb. Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, he climbed behind the wheel and started the engine. The radio had been left on; a woman with a low, bored voice was reading a news bulletin on Deutschlandfunk. Unlike many of his countrymen, Gabriel did not recoil at the sound of German. It was the language he had heard in his mother’s womb, and even now it remained the language of his dreams. Chiara, when she spoke to him in his sleep, spoke in German.

He found the parking chit where Transport had said it would be—in the center console, tucked inside a brochure for Munich’s racier nightclubs—and drove with a foreigner’s caution toward the exit. The parking attendant examined the chit long enough to send the first operational charge of electricity down the length of Gabriel’s spine. Then the arm of the barricade rose, and he made his way to the entrance of the autobahn. As he drove through the Bavarian sunlight, memories assailed him at every turn. To his right, floating above the Munich skyline, was the space-age Olympic Tower, beneath which Black September had carried out the attack that launched Gabriel’s career. And an hour later, when he crossed into Austria, the first town he entered was Braunau am Inn, the birthplace of Hitler. He tried to keep thoughts of Vienna at bay, but it was beyond his powers of compartmentalization. He heard a car engine hesitate to turn over and saw a flash of fire rising over a graceful street. And he sat again at Leah’s hospital bed and told her that her child was dead.
We should have stayed in Venice together, my love. Things would have turned out differently
. . . Yes, he thought now. Things would be different. He would have a son of twenty-five. And he would never have fallen in love with a beautiful young girl from the ghetto named Chiara Zolli.

The house where Hitler was born stood at Salzburger Vorstadt 15, not far from Braunau’s main shopping square. Gabriel parked across the street and sat for a moment with the engine idling, wondering whether he had the strength to go through with it. Then, suddenly, he flung open the door and propelled himself across the street, as if to remove the option of turning back. Twenty-five years earlier, Braunau’s mayor had decided to place a stone of remembrance outside the house. It had been mined from the quarry at Mauthausen and was carved with an inscription that made no specific mention of the Jews or the Holocaust. Alone, Gabriel stood before it, thinking not of the murder of six million but of the war taking place two thousand miles to the southeast, in Syria. Despite all the books, the documentaries, the memorials, and the declarations regarding universal human rights, a dictator was once again killing his people with poison gas and turning them into human skeletons in camps and prisons. It was almost as if the lessons of the Holocaust had been forgotten. Or perhaps, thought Gabriel, they had never been learned in the first place.

A young German couple—their distinct accents betrayed them as Bavarians—joined him at the stone and spoke of Hitler as though he were a minor tyrant from a distant empire. Dispirited, Gabriel returned to his car and set out across Upper Austria. Snow clung to the highest mountain peaks, but in the valleys, where the villages lay, the meadows burned with wildflowers. He entered Linz a few minutes after two o’clock and parked near the New Cathedral. Then he spent an hour surveying what would soon be the most bucolic battlefield in the Syrian civil war. It was festival season in Linz. A film festival had just ended; a jazz festival would soon begin. Pale Austrians sunned themselves on the green lawns of Danube Park. Overhead, a single cotton wool cloud scudded across the azure sky like a barrage balloon adrift from its moorings.

The last stop on Gabriel’s survey was the streetcar roundabout adjacent to Bank Weber AG. Parked outside the bank’s plain entrance, its engine throbbing at idle, was a black Mercedes Maybach limousine. Judging by the way the car was resting low on its wheels, it was heavily armored. Gabriel sat on a bench and allowed two trams to pass. Then, as a third was nearing the stop, he saw an elegantly dressed man emerge from the bank and duck quickly into the back of the car. His face was memorable for its hard cheekbones and unusually small, straight mouth. A few seconds later, the car shot past Gabriel’s shoulder in a black blur. The man was now holding a mobile phone tensely to his ear. Money never sleeps, thought Gabriel. Even blood money.

When a fourth tram slithered into the roundabout, Gabriel stepped on board and rode it to the other side of the Danube. He searched the undercarriage of the car a second time to make certain it had not been tampered with in his absence. Then he headed for the Attersee. The safe house was located on the western shore of the lake, near the town of Litzlberg. There was a wooden gate, and beyond the gate stretched a drive lined with pine and flowering vines. Several cars were parked in the forecourt, including an old Renault with Corsican registration plates. Its owner was standing in the open door of the villa, dressed casually in a pair of loose-fitting khaki trousers and a yellow cotton pullover. “I’m Peter Rutledge,” he said, extending his arm toward Gabriel with a smile. “Welcome to Shangri-La.”