“We’re going to clean you up. Then we’re going to take a drive.”
“Where?”
Gabriel stared at Estermann blankly.
“There’s no way you’ll get past the guards at the checkpoint.”
“I won’t have to. You’ll do it for me.”
“It won’t work.”
“For your sake, it better. But before we leave, I’d like you to answer one more question.” Gabriel placed Estermann’s phone on the table. “Why did you go to Bonn after you spoke to Stefani Hoffmann? And why did you switch off your phone for two hours and fifty-seven minutes?”
“I didn’t go to Bonn.”
“Your phone says you did.” Gabriel tapped the screen. “It says you left Café du Gothard at two thirty-four p.m. and that you reached the outskirts of Bonn around seven fifteen, which is rather good time, I must say. At that point, you switched off your phone. I want to know why.”
“I told you, I didn’t go to Bonn.”
“Where did you go?”
The German hesitated. “I was in Grosshau. It’s a little farming village a few miles to the west.”
“What’s in Grosshau?”
“A cottage in the woods.”
“Who lives there?”
“A man named Hamid Fawzi.”
“Who is he?”
“He’s a creation of my cyber unit.”
“Is he the reason bombs are going off in Germany?”
“No,” said Estermann. “I am.”
43
Cologne, Germany
Gerhardt Schmidt was notknown for working long hours. Typically, he arrived at BfV headquarters in Cologne with a minute or two to spare before the ten a.m. senior staff meeting, and barring some emergency he was in the backseat of his official limousine no later than five. Most nights he stopped at one of the city’s better watering holes for a drink. But only one. Everything in moderation, that was Schmidt’s personal maxim. It would be chiseled on his tombstone.
The bombings in Berlin and Hamburg had proven detrimental to Schmidt’s salubrious daily schedule. That morning he was at his desk at the ungodly hour of eight o’clock, a time when ordinarily he would still be in bed with coffee and the papers. Consequently, when his secure phone pulsed with an incoming call from Tel Aviv at eight fifteen, he was there to answer it.
He had been expecting to hear the voice of Gabriel Allon, the legendary director-general of the Israeli secret intelligence service. Instead, it was Uzi Navot, Allon’s deputy, who bade Schmidt a pleasant morning in perfect German. Schmidt had a grudging respect for Allon, but Navot he loathed. For many years the Israeli had worked undercover in Europe, running networks and recruiting agents, including three who worked for the BfV.
Within a few seconds, however, Schmidt was deeply remorseful he had ever uttered an unkind word—indeed, that he had ever entertained a slanderous thought—about the man at the other end of the secure line. It seemed the Israelis, as was often the case, had tapped into a vein of magic intelligence, this time regarding the new cell wreaking havoc in Germany. Navot was predictably evasive about how he had acquired this intelligence. It was a mosaic, he claimed, a blend of human sources and electronic intercepts. Lives were at stake. The clock was ticking.
Whatever the source of the information, it was highly specific. It concerned a property in Grosshau, a tiny farming hamlet located on the edge of the dense German forest known as the Hürtgenwald. The property was owned by something called OSH Holdings, a Hamburg-based concern. There were two structures, a traditional German farmhouse and an outbuilding fashioned of corrugated metal. The farmhouse was largely unfurnished. In the outbuilding, however, was a ten-year-old Mitsubishi light-duty cargo truck loaded with two dozen drums of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, nitromethane, and Tovex, the makings of an ANNM bomb.
The truck was registered to a Hamid Fawzi, a refugee, originally from Damascus, who had settled in Frankfurt after Syriaerupted into civil war. Or so claimed his social media pages, which were updated frequently. An engineer by training, Fawzi worked as an IT specialist for a German consulting firm, which was also owned by OSH Holdings. His wife, Asma, wore a full-face veil whenever she left their apartment. They had two children, a daughter named Salma and a boy named Mohammad.
According to Navot’s intelligence, a single operative was scheduled to arrive at the property that morning at ten o’clock. He could not say whether it would be Hamid Fawzi. He was quite certain, however, about the target: the immensely popular Cologne Christmas market now under way at the historic cathedral.
Gerhardt Schmidt had a long list of questions he wanted to ask Navot, but there wasn’t time for anything more than an expression of profound gratitude. After hanging up, he immediately rang the interior minister, who in turn rang the chancellor, along with Schmidt’s counterpart at the Bundespolizei. The first officers arrived at the farmhouse at eight thirty. A few minutes after nine, they were joined by four teams from GSG 9, Germany’s elite tactical and counterterrorism unit.
