The Order (Gabriel Allon #20) - Daniel Silva Page 0,67

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 to the 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.

“Two and a half billion in pure profit last year alone,” announced Lavon. “And where do you think it all goes?”

That evening the team set aside its work long enough to share a traditional family meal. Mikhail Abramov and Natalie Mizrahi were absent, however, for they dined at Café Adagio in the Beethovenplatz. It was located in the basement level of a yellow building on the square’s northwestern flank. By day it served bistro fare, but at night it was one of the neighborhood’s most popular bars. Mikhail and Natalie pronounced the food mediocre but judged the likelihood of successfully abducting a patron to be quite high.

“Three stars on the Michelin scale,” quipped Mikhail upon their return to the safe house. “If Estermann comes to Café Adagio alone, he leaves in the back of a van.”

The team took delivery of the vehicle in question, a Mercedes transit van, at nine the following morning, along with two Audi A8 sedans, two BMW motor scooters, a set of false German registration plates, four Jericho .45-caliber pistols, an Uzi Pro compact submachine gun, and a 9mm Beretta with a walnut grip.

At which point the tension in the safe house seemed to rise by several notches. As was often the case, Gabriel’s mood darkened as the zero hour drew near. Mikhail reminded him that a year earlier, in a warehouse in a drab commercial district of Tehran, a sixteen-member team had blowtorched its way into thirty-two safes and removed several hundred computer discs and millions of pages of documents. The team had then loaded the material into a cargo truck and driven it to the shore of the Caspian Sea, where a boat had been waiting. The operation had shocked the world and proved once again that the Office could strike at will, even in the capital of its most implacable foe.

“And how many Iranians did you have to kill in order to get out of the country alive?”

“Details, details,” said Mikhail dismissively. “The point is, we can do this with our eyes closed.”

“I’d rather you do it with your eyes open. It will substantially increase our chances of success.”

By midday Gabriel had managed to convince himself that they were doomed to failure, that he would spend the rest of his life in a German prison cell for crimes too numerous to recall, an ignoble end to a career against which all others would be measured. Eli Lavon accurately diagnosed the source of Gabriel’s despair, for he was suffering from the same malady. It was Munich, thought Lavon. And it was the book.

It was never far from their thoughts, especially Lavon’s. There was not one member of the team whose life had not been altered by the longest hatred. Nearly all had lost relatives to the fires of the Holocaust. Some had been born only because one member of a family had found the will to survive. Like Isabel Feldman, the only surviving child of Samuel Feldman, who handed