“Maybe you should ask him about the Gospel of Pilate, too.”
“Don’t worry, Eli. I will.”
When Gabriel and Lavon returned to the safe house, the members of the snatch team were gathered in the sitting room, dressed for an evening out at a trendy café in the Beethovenplatz. There was no outward sign of nerves other than the incessant tapping of Mikhail’s forefinger against the arm of his chair. He was listening intently to the voice of Andreas Estermann, who was addressing the members of his senior staff about the need to increase security at all Wolf Group facilities, especially the chemical plants. It seemed Estermann had received a warning from an old contact at the BfV, a warning the team had overheard. The system, apparently, was blinking red.
By five fifteen it was blinking red inside the safe house as well. The members of the snatch team took their leave in the same manner they had arrived—intermittently, alone or in pairs, soas not to attract attention from the neighbors. By 5:45 they all had reached their fail-safe points.
Their quarry left Wolf Group headquarters seventeen minutes later. Gabriel watched his progress on an open laptop computer, a blinking blue light on a map of central Munich, courtesy of the compromised phone. It had already told Gabriel nearly everything he needed to know to prevent the Order of St. Helena from stealing the conclave. Still, there were one or two matters Andreas Estermann needed to clear up. If he had any sense, he would offer no resistance. Gabriel was in a dangerously bad mood. They were in Munich, after all. The Capital of the Movement. The city where murderers once walked.
39
Beethovenplatz, Munich
Just north ofMunich’s central train station, the traffic came to an abrupt halt. It was another police checkpoint. There were several around the city, mainly near transportation hubs and in squares and markets where large numbers of pedestrians congregated. The entire country was on edge, bracing itself for the next attack. Even the BfV, Andreas Estermann’s old service, was convinced another bombing was inevitable. Estermann was of a similar mind. Indeed, he had reason to believe the next attack would occur as early as tomorrow morning, probably in Cologne. If successful, the physical destruction and death toll would tear at the very soul of the country, touch an ancient nerve. It would be Germany’s 9/11. Nothing would ever be the same.
Estermann checked the time on his iPhone, then sworesoftly. Immediately, he pleaded with God for forgiveness. The strictures of the Order forbade all forms of profanity, not just those involving the Lord’s name. Estermann did not smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol, and regular fasting and exercise helped to keep down his weight, despite a weakness for traditional German cooking. His wife, Johanna, was a member of the Order, too. So were their six children. The size of their family was unusual in modern Germany, where birth rates had fallen below replacement level.
Estermann again checked the time.6:04...He dialed Christoph Bittel’s number but received no answer. Then he dashed off a text message, explaining that he had left the office later than planned and was now stuck in traffic. Bittel replied instantly. It seemed he was running behind schedule as well, which was not like him. Bittel was usually as punctual as a Swiss timepiece.
At last, the traffic inched forward. Estermann saw the reason for the delay. The police were searching a delivery van outside the entrance of the station. The passengers, two young men, Arabs or Turks, lay spread-eagled on the pavement. Estermann took no small amount of pleasure in their predicament. When he was a boy growing up in Munich, he rarely saw a foreigner, especially one with brown or black skin. That changed in the 1980s, when the floodgates opened. Twelve million immigrants now resided in Germany, fifteen percent of the population. The overwhelming majority were Muslims. Unless present trends were reversed, native Germans would soon be a minority in their own land.
Estermann turned onto the Goethestrasse, a quiet street lined with elegant old apartment houses, and eased into an empty space along the curb at ten minutes past six. He lostthree additional minutes purchasing a chit from the automatic dispenser and another two walking the rest of the way to Café Adagio. It was a dimly lit room with a few tables arranged around a platform where, later that evening, a trio of American jazz musicians would perform. Estermann did not care for jazz. Nor did he much like the clientele of Café Adagio. At a darkened table in the corner, two women—at least Estermann thought they were women—were kissing. A couple of tables away sat two men. One had a hard, pitted face. The other was thin as a reed. They looked like Eastern Europeans, maybe Jews. At least they weren’t queers. Estermann hated queers even more than he hated Jews and Muslims.
Bittel was nowhere to be seen. Estermann sat down at a table as far from the other patrons as possible. At length, a tattooed girl with purple hair wandered over. She looked at Estermann for a moment as though waiting for him to utter the secret password.
“Diet Coke.”
The waitress withdrew. Estermann checked his phone. Where the hell was Bittel? And why in God’s name had he chosen a place like Café Adagio?
Andreas Estermann’s discomfort was so transparent that Gabriel waited ten additional minutes before informing the German that, owing to a work emergency, Christoph Bittel would not be able to meet for a drink as planned. Estermann’s face, viewed through the camera lens of his compromised phone, twisted into a grimace. He sent a curt response, tossed a five-euro banknote onto the table, and stormed into the street.Fuming, he pounded along the pavements of the Goethestrasse to his car, where his rising anger boiled over.
A man was sitting on the hood, his boots resting on the bumper, a girl between his legs. His pale skin was luminous in the lamplight. The girl was very dark, like an Arab. Her hands were resting on the man’s thighs. Her mouth was on his.
Estermann would have only limited memory of what happened next. There was an exchange of words, followed by an exchange of blows. Estermann threw a single wild punch but was on the receiving end of several compact, carefully delivered elbows and knees.
Incapacitated, he crumpled to the pavement. From somewhere a van materialized. Estermann was hurled into the back like war dead. He felt a sharp pain in his neck, and instantly his vision began to swim. The last thing he remembered before losing consciousness was the face of the woman. She was an Arab, he was sure of it. Estermann hated Arabs. Almost as much as he hated Jews.
40
Munich
There is nosuch thing, practitioners of the secret trade like to say, as a perfect covert operation. The best a careful planner can do is limit the chances of failure and exposure—or, worse still, of arrest and prosecution. Sometimes the planner willingly accepts a modicum of risk when lives are at stake or his cause is just. And sometimes he must resign himself to the fact that a small measure of serendipity, of providence, will determine whether his ship reaches port safely or smashes itself to pieces on the rocks.
Gabriel struck just such a bargain with the operational gods that evening in Munich. Yes, he had lured Andreas Estermann to Café Adagio for what he thought was a meeting with an old acquaintance. But it was Estermann, not Gabriel and his team,who had selected the place of his abduction. Fortunately, Estermann chose well. There was no traffic camera to record his disappearance, and no witness other than a dachshund in the window of an adjacent apartment building.
Ninety minutes later, after a brief stop in the countryside west of Munich for a change of license plates, the van returned to the safe house near the Englischer Garten. Bound and blindfolded, Andreas Estermann was transferred to a makeshift holding cell in the basement. Typically, Gabriel would have left him there for a day or two to ponder his fate while deprived of sight, sound, and sleep. Instead, at half past ten, he instructed Natalie to hasten Estermann’s return to consciousness. She injected him with a mild stimulant along with a little something to take the edge off. Something to distort his sense of reality. Something to loosen his tongue.
Consequently, Estermann offered no resistance when Mordecai and Oded secured him to a metal chair outside the holding cell. On the opposite side of a table, flanked by Yaakov Rossman and Eli Lavon, sat Gabriel. Behind him was a tripod-mounted Solaris phone. Blindfolded, Estermann knew none of this. He only knew that he was in a great deal of trouble. The matter before him, however, was easily resolved. All that was required was his signature on a statement. A bill of particulars. Names and numbers.
At 10:34 p.m., Estermann’s inquisitor spoke for the first time. The camera captured the expression on the portion of the German’s face not concealed by the blindfold. Later, the video would be analyzed by the specialists at King Saul Boulevard. All were in agreement on one point. It was a look of profound relief.
Though cursed with a flawless memory, Gabriel sometimes found it hard to accurately recall his mother’s face. Two of her self-portraits hung in his bedroom in Jerusalem. Each night before he drifted off to sleep, he saw her as she had seen herself, a tormented figure rendered in the manner of the German Expressionists.
Like many young women who survived the Holocaust, she struggled with the demands of caring for a child. She was prone to melancholia and violent mood swings. She could not show pleasure on festive occasions and did not partake of rich food or drink. She wore a bandage always on her left arm, over the faded numbers tattooed into her skin.29395...She referred to them as her mark of Jewish weakness. Her emblem of Jewish shame.
Painting, like motherhood, was an ordeal for her. Gabriel used to sit on the floor at her feet, scribbling in his sketchpad, while she labored at her easel. To distract herself, she used to tell stories of her childhood in Berlin. She spoke to Gabriel in German, in her thick Berlin accent. It was Gabriel’s first language, and even now it was the language of his dreams. His Italian, while fluent, bore the faint but unmistakable trace of a foreigner’s intonation. But not his German. No matter where he traveled in the country, no one ever assumed he was anything but a native speaker of the language, one who had been raised in the center of Berlin.
Andreas Estermann clearly assumed that was the case as well, which prompted his misplaced expression of relief. It faded quickly once Gabriel explained why he had been taken into custody. Gabriel did not identify himself, though he implied he was a secret member of the Order of St. Helena who had beenasked by Herr Wolf and Bishop Richter to investigate certain financial irregularities that had recently come to their attention. These irregularities concerned the existence of a bank account in the principality of Liechtenstein. Gabriel recited the current balance and the dates on which deposits had been made. Then he read aloud the text messages Estermann had exchanged with his private banker, Herr Hassler, lest Estermann entertain any thought of wriggling off the hook.
