The Order (Gabriel Allon #20) - Daniel Silva Page 0,65

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 Bf V 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 LANDED ON 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 feed from 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