The Germans had left their indelible mark on the architecture of Strasbourg, the much-conquered city on the western bank of the river Rhine, but Sabine was defiantly French in appearance. She stood on the corner of the rue de Berne and rue de Soleure, tan and vaguely Mediterranean, with wide balconies and white aluminum shutters. Two businesses occupied the ground floor, a Turkish kebab stand and a forlorn hair studio for men whose owner spent many hours each day peering idly into the street. Between the two enterprises was the tenant entrance. The call buttons were located on the right side. The tiny nameplate for apartment 5B readbergier.
The building directly opposite wore its Germanness without apology. Gabriel arrived there unaccompanied by bodyguards at four fifteen. He found apartment 3A in a state of permanent night, with the shades tightly drawn and the lights dimmed. Eli Lavon was hunched over an open laptop, as he had been that night in Vienna, but now Yaakov Rossman was hovering over him, pointing at something on the screen like a sommelier offering advice to a dithering customer. Mikhail and Keller, pistols in their outstretched hands, were pivoting with the silence of ballet dancers through the doorway to the kitchen.
“Can you please make them stop?” begged Yaakov. “They’re driving us to distraction. Besides, it’s not as if they’ve never cleared a room before.”
Gabriel watched Mikhail and Keller repeat the exercise. Then he looked down at the computer screen and saw a blinking blue light moving southward between Heidelberg and Karlsruhe, on the German side of the border.
“Is that Sergei?”
“Two of my boys,” explained Lavon. “Sergei’s several hundred meters ahead of them. He left Frankfurt about forty minutes ago. No SVR gorillas, no Germans. He’s clean.”
“So was Konstantin Kirov,” said Gabriel gloomily. “What about Werner?”
“He caught the Vienna-to-Paris sunrise express and was inside the Interior Ministry by ten. He and his French colleagues, including a certain Paul Rousseau from the Alpha Group, had a working lunch. Then Werner complained of a migraine and said he was going to his hotel to rest. He went to the Gare de l’Est instead and caught the two fifty-five to Strasbourg. He’s due in at four forty. It’s a ten-minute walk at most from the train station.”
Gabriel tapped the blinking blue light, which was passing through the small German town of Ettlingen. “And Sergei?”
“If he makes a beeline to the flat, he’ll arrive at four twenty. If he takes a trip to the dry cleaners first...”
On a second computer was an exterior shot of the apartment building code-named Sabine. Gabriel pointed toward the figure standing in the doorway of the men’s hair salon. “What about him?”
“Yaakov thinks we should kill him,” said Lavon. “I was hoping to find a more just solution.”
“The solution,” said Gabriel, “is a customer.”
“He’s only had two all day,” said Yaakov.
“So we’ll find him a third.”
“Who?”
Gabriel tousled Lavon’s unruly head of hair.
“I’m a little busy at the moment.”
“What about Doron?”
“He’s one of my best pavement artists. And he’s very particular about his hair.”
Gabriel leaned down and tapped a few keys on the laptop. Then he watched Mikhail and Keller pirouetting soundlessly through the doorway.
“Don’t even think about it,” said Eli Lavon.
“Me? I’m the chief of Israeli intelligence, for God’s sake.”
“Yes,” said Lavon as he watched the approaching blue light. “Tell that to Saladin.”
The blinking blue light entered Strasbourg at four fifteen, and on Gabriel’s orders the watchers broke off their pursuit. It was one thing to follow an SVR hood at a hundred miles an hour along the Autobahn, quite another to tail him through the quiet streets of an ancient Franco-German city on the banks of the river Rhine. Besides, Gabriel knew where the SVR hood was going. It was the building code-named Sabine on the opposite side of the rue de Berne. The building with two businesses on the ground floor—a Turkish kebab café where two former elite soldiers, one Israeli, the other British, were now partaking of a late lunch, and a men’s hair salon that had just received its third customer of the day.
The SVR hood made a first motorized pass at 4:25 and a second at 4:31. Finally, at 4:35, he parked his BMW sedan directly beneath the window of the command post and crossed the street. When they saw him next it was at 4:39, and he was standing on the balcony of apartment 5B. In the corner of his mouth was an unlit cigarette, and in his right hand was something that might have been a book of matches. The cigarette was the signal. Lighted cigarette meant the coast was clear. Unlit cigarette meant abort. Old school all the way, thought Gabriel.Moscow Rules...
At 4:40 a train arrived at the Gare de Strasbourg, and ten minutes later an Austrian secret policeman who was supposed to be recovering from a migraine in a Paris hotel room strolled past the window of the Turkish café. He glanced toward the balcony five floors above, where the SVR hood’s cigarette glowed like the running light of a ship. Then he went to the door of the building and pressed the call button for apartment 5B. Five floors above, the SVR hood flicked his cigarette carelessly into the street and disappeared through the French doors.
“Move!” said Yaakov Rossman into the microphone of his miniature radio, and in the Turkish café the two former elite soldiers rose simultaneously to their feet. Outside on the pavement, they walked with no visible haste toward the tenant entrance, where the Austrian was now holding the door for them. Then the door closed and the three men vanished from view.
It was at this point, for reasons known only to himself, that Eli Lavon began recording the feed from the exterior surveillance camera. The final unedited file was five minutes and eighteen seconds in length, and like the security video from the Schweizerhof Hotel, it would become required viewing inside King Saul Boulevard, at least for those of sufficient seniority and clearance.
The action commences with the arrival of a Ford panel van, from which two men alight and casually enter the building. They reappear four minutes later, each carrying one end of a long and quite obviously heavy duffel bag containing a Russian intelligence officer. The bag is placed in the cargo hold of the van, and the van pulls from the curb, just as the two former elite soldiers, one Israeli, the other British, exit the apartment building. They cross the street to a BMW sedan and climb inside. The engine starts, lights flicker to life. Then the car turns onto the rue de Soleure and slides from the shot.
