The first to arrive was Yossi Gavish, the tweedy, British-born head of Research. He was followed by Mordecai and Oded, a pair of all-purpose field hands, and a kid named Ilan who knew how to make the computers work. Next came Yaakov Rossman and Dina Sarid. Yaakov was the head of Special Ops. Dina was a human database of Palestinian and Islamic terrorism who possessed an uncanny knack for spotting connections others missed. Both spoke fluent German.
Mikhail Abramov wandered in around noon. Tall and lanky, with pale bloodless skin and eyes like glacial ice, he had immigrated to Israel from Russia as a teenager and joined the Sayeret Matkal, the IDF’s elite special operations unit. Often described as Gabriel without a conscience, he had personally assassinated several top terror masterminds from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. He now carried out similar assignments on behalf of the Office, though his extraordinary talents were not limited to the gun. A year earlier he had led a team into Tehran and stolen Iran’s entire nuclear archives.
He was accompanied by Natalie Mizrahi, who also happened to be his wife. Born and educated in France, fluent in the Algerian dialect of Arabic, she had traded a promising medical career for the dangerous life of an undercover Office field agent. Her first assignment took her to Raqqa, the capital of the short-lived caliphate of the Islamic State, where she penetrated ISIS’s external terrorism network. Were it not for Gabriel and Mikhail, the operation would have been her last.
Like the other members of the team, Natalie had only the vaguest idea why she had been ordered to Munich. Now, in the half-light of the formal drawing room, she listened intently as Gabriel told the team the story of a well-deserved family vacation that was not to be. Summoned to Rome by Archbishop Luigi Donati, he had learned that Pope Paul VII, a man who had done much to undo the Catholic Church’s terrible legacy of anti-Semitism, had died under mysterious circumstances. Though skeptical that the Holy Father had been murdered, Gabriel had nonetheless agreed to use the resources of the Office to undertake an informal investigation. It led him to Florence, where he witnessed the brutal killing of a missing Swiss Guard, and then to a cottage outside Fribourg, where an unfinished letter fell from a framed picture of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.
The letter concerned a book His Holiness had discovered in the Vatican Secret Archives. A book purportedly based on the memoirs of the Roman prefect of Judea who sentenced Jesus to death by crucifixion. A book that contradicted the accounts of Jesus’ death contained in the canonical Gospels, accounts that were the seedbed of two thousand years of sometimes murderous anti-Semitism.
The book was missing, but the men who took it were hiding in plain sight. They were members of a reactionary and secretive Catholic order founded in southern Germany by a priest who found much to admire in the politics of the European far right, especially National Socialism. The spiritual descendants of this priest, whose name was Ulrich Schiller, planned to steal the approaching papal conclave and elect one of their own as the next supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church. As chief of the Office, Gabriel had determined that such a development would not be in the interests of the State of Israel or Europe’s 1.5 million Jews. Therefore, it was his intention to help his friend Luigi Donati steal the conclave back.
To do so required undeniable proof of the Order’s plot. Time was of the essence. Gabriel needed the information no later than Thursday night, the eve of the conclave. Fortunately, he had identified two important lay members involved in the conspiracy. One was a reclusive German industrialist named Jonas Wolf. The other was a former BfV officer named Andreas Estermann.
Estermann would be arriving at Café Adagio on the Beethovenplatz at six p.m. Wednesday. He would be expecting a Swiss intelligence officer named Christoph Bittel. He would find the Office instead. Immediately following his abduction, he would be brought to the Munich safe house for questioning. Gabriel decreed that the interrogation would not be a fishing expedition. Estermann would merely sign his name to a statement the team had already prepared, a bill of particulars detailing the Order’s plot to steal the conclave. A retired professional, he would not break easily. Leverage would be required. The team would have to find that, too. All in a span of just thirty hours.
They lodged not a word of protest and posed not a single question. Instead, they opened their laptops, established secure links to Tel Aviv, and went to work. Two hours later, as a gentle snow whitened the lawns of the Englischer Garten, they fired their first shot.
37
Munich
The e-mail that landedon Andreas Estermann’s phone a few seconds later appeared to have been sent by Christoph Bittel. In truth, it had been dispatched by a twenty-two-year-old MIT-educated hacker from Unit 8200 in Tel Aviv. It sat on Estermann’s device for nearly twenty minutes, long enough for Gabriel to fear the worst. Finally, Estermann opened it and clicked on the attachment, a decade-old photograph of a Swiss-German gathering of spies in Bern. In doing so, he unleashed a sophisticated malware attack that instantly seized control of the phone’s operating system. Within minutes, it was exporting a year’s worth of e-mails, text messages, GPS data, telephone metadata, and Internet browsing history, all without Estermann’s knowledge. The Unit bounced the material securely from Tel Aviv to the safe house, along with a live feedfrom the phone’s microphone and camera. Even Estermann’s calendar entries, past and future, were theirs to peruse at will. On Wednesday evening he had a single appointment: drinks at Café Adagio, six o’clock.
Estermann’s contacts contained the private mobile numbers of Bishop Hans Richter and his private secretary, Father Markus Graf. Both succumbed to malware attacks launched by Unit 8200, as did Cardinal Camerlengo Domenico Albanese and Cardinal Archbishop Franz von Emmerich of Vienna, the man whom the Order had selected to be the next pope.
Elsewhere in Estermann’s contacts the team found evidence of the Order’s astonishing reach. It was as if an electronic version of Father Schiller’s leather-bound ledger had fallen into their laps. There were private phone numbers and e-mail addresses for Austrian chancellor Jörg Kaufmann, Italian prime minister Giuseppe Saviano, Cécile Leclerc of France’s Popular Front, Peter van der Meer of the Dutch Freedom Party, and, of course, Axel Brünner of Germany’s far-right National Democrats. Analysis of the phone’s metadata revealed that Estermann and Brünner had spoken five times during the past week alone, a period that coincided with Brünner’s sudden surge in German public opinion polls.
Fortunately for the team, Estermann conducted much of his personal and professional correspondence via text message. For sensitive communications he used a service that promised end-to-end encryption and complete privacy, a promise Unit 8200 had long ago rendered empty. Not only was the team able to see his current texts in real time, they were able to review his deleted messages as well.
Gabriel’s name featured prominently in several exchanges, asdid Luigi Donati’s. Indeed, Donati had appeared on the Order’s early-warning system within hours of the Holy Father’s death. The Order had been aware of Gabriel’s arrival in Rome and of his presence in Florence. It had learned of his visit to Switzerland from Father Erich, the village priest from Rechthalten. The phone betrayed that Estermann had visited Switzerland as well. GPS data confirmed he spent forty-nine minutes in Café du Gothard in Fribourg on the Saturday after the Holy Father’s death. Afterward, he had driven to Bonn, where he switched off the phone for a period of two hours and fifty-seven minutes.
If there was a bright spot, it was the cleanliness of Estermann’s personal life. The team found no evidence of a mistress or fondness for pornography. Estermann’s consumption of news was broad but tilted decidedly to the right. Several of the German websites he visited daily trafficked in false and misleading stories that inflamed public opinion against Muslim immigrants and the political left. Otherwise, he had no nasty browsing habits.
But no man is perfect, and few are without at least one weakness. Estermann’s, it turned out, was money. Analysis of his encrypted text messages revealed that he was in regular contact with a certain Herr Hassler, owner of a private bank in the principality of Liechtenstein. Analysis of Herr Hassler’s records, conducted without his consent, revealed the existence of an account in Estermann’s name. The team had found numerous such accounts spread throughout the world, but the one in tiny Liechtenstein was different.
“Estermann’s wife, Johanna, is the beneficiary,” said Dina Sarid.
“What’s the current balance?” asked Gabriel.
“Just north of a million and a half.”
“When was it opened?”
“About three months ago. He’s made sixteen deposits. Each one was one hundred thousand euros exactly. If you ask me, he’s skimming from the payments he’s making to the cardinals.”
“What about the Vatican Bank?”
“The accounts of twelve of the cardinal-electors have received large wire transfers in the last six weeks. Four were over a million. The rest were around eight hundred thousand. All of them can be traced back to Estermann.”
But the ultimate source of the money was the secretive Munich-based conglomerate that Alessandro Ricci had described as the Order of St. Helena Inc. Eli Lavon, the team’s most experienced financial investigator, took it upon himself to penetrate the company’s defenses. They were formidable, which came as no surprise. After all, he had matched wits with the Order once before. Twenty years ago, he had been at a distinct disadvantage. Now he had Unit 8200 in his corner, and he had Jonas Wolf.
The German businessman proved to be as elusive as the company that bore his name, beginning with the basics of his biography. As far as Lavon could tell, Wolf had been bornsomewhere in Germany,sometime during the war. He had been educated at Heidelberg University—of that, Lavon was certain—and had earned a PhD in applied mathematics. He acquired his first company, a small chemical firm, in 1970 with money borrowed from a friend. Within ten years he had expanded into shipping, manufacturing, and construction. And by the mid-1980s he was an extraordinarily wealthy man.
He purchased a graceful old town house in the Maxvorstadtdistrict of Munich and a valley high in the Obersalzberg, northeast of Berchtesgaden. It was his intention to create a baronial refuge for his family and their descendants. But when his wife and two sons were killed in a private plane crash in 1988, Wolf’s mountain redoubt became his prison. Once or twice a week, weather permitting, he traveled to Wolf Group’s headquarters in north Munich by helicopter. But for the most part he remained in the Obersalzberg, surrounded by his small army of bodyguards. He had not granted an interview in more than twenty years. Not since the release of an unauthorized biography that accused him of arranging the plane crash that killed his family. Reporters who tried to pry open the locked rooms of his past faced financial ruin or, in the case of a meddlesome British investigative journalist, physical violence. Wolf’s involvement in the reporter’s death—she was killed by a hit-and-run driver while cycling through the countryside near Devon—was much rumored but never proven.
To Eli Lavon, the story of Jonas Wolf’s spectacular rise sounded too good to be true. There was, for a start, the loan Wolf had received to purchase his first company. Lavon had a hunch, based on hard-won experience, that Wolf’s lender had been a Canton Zug–based concern known as the Order of St. Helena. Furthermore, Lavon was of the opinion—again, it was merely well-informed conjecture—that the Wolf Group was far larger than advertised.
Because it was an entirely private company, one that had never received a single loan from a single German bank, Lavon’s options for traditional financial inquiry were limited. Estermann’s phone, however, opened many doors within the firm’s computer network that might otherwise have remained closed, even tothe cybersleuths at Unit 8200. Shortly after eight o’clock that evening, they tunneled into Jonas Wolf’s personal database and found the keys to the kingdom, a two-hundred-page document detailing the company’s global holdings and the staggering income they generated.
