The Order (Gabriel Allon #20) - Daniel Silva Page 0,66
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, as did 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 born somewhere 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 Maxvorstadt district 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