The Order (Gabriel Allon #20) - Daniel Silva Page 0,68

over a small fortune in cash and valuables to the Order of St. Helena in exchange for false baptismal certificates and false promises of protection.

Another such woman was Irene Frankel. Born in Berlin, she was deported to Auschwitz in the autumn of 1942. Her parents were gassed upon arrival, but Irene Frankel left Auschwitz on the Death March in January 1945. She arrived in the new State of Israel in 1948. There she met a man from Munich, a writer, an intellectual, who had escaped to Palestine before the war. In Germany his name had been Greenberg, but in Israel he had taken the name Allon. After marrying, they vowed to have six children, one for each million murdered, but a single child was all her womb could bear. She named the child Gabriel, the messenger of God, the interpreter of Daniel’s visions.

At two o’clock they all realized it had been several minutes since anyone had seen him or heard his voice. A rapid search of the safe house revealed no trace of him, and a call to his phone received no answer. Unit 8200 confirmed the device was powered on and that it was moving through the Englischer Garten at a walking pace. Eli Lavon was confident he knew where it was headed. The child of Irene Frankel wanted to see where it had happened. Lavon couldn’t blame him. He was suffering from the same malady.

38

MUNICH

IN JULY 1935, TWO AND a half years after electorally seizing control of Germany, Adolf Hitler formally declared Munich “the Capital of the Movement.” The city’s ties to National Socialism were undeniable. The Nazi Party was formed in Munich in the turbulent years after Germany’s defeat in World War I. And it was in Munich, in the autumn of 1923, that Hitler led the abortive Beer Hall Putsch that resulted in his brief incarceration at Landsberg Prison. There he penned the first volume of Mein Kampf, the rambling manifesto in which he described Jews as germs that needed to be exterminated. During his first year as chancellor, the year in which he transformed Germany into a totalitarian dictatorship, the book sold more than a million copies.

Throughout the fifteen cataclysmic years of the Nazi era, Hitler traveled to Munich frequently. He maintained a large, art-filled apartment at Prinzregentenplatz 16 and commissioned the construction of a personal office building overlooking the Königsplatz. Known as the Führerbau it contained living quarters for Hitler and his deputy, Rudolf Hess, and a cavernous central hall with twin stone staircases that led to a conference room. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement in the Führerbau on September 30, 1938. Upon his return to London, he predicted the accord would deliver “peace in our time.” A year later the Wehrmacht invaded Poland, plunging the world into war and setting in motion the chain of events that would lead to the destruction of Europe’s Jews.

Much of central Munich was leveled by a pair of devastating Allied bombing raids in April 1944, but somehow the Führerbau survived. Immediately after the war, the Allies used it as a storage facility for looted art. It was now the home of a respected school of music and theater, where pianists, cellists, violinists, and actors perfected their craft in rooms where murderers once walked. Bicycles lined the building’s leaden facade, and at the foot of the main steps stood two bored-looking Munich police officers. Neither paid any heed to the man of medium height and build who paused to review a schedule of upcoming public recitals.

He continued past the Alte Pinakothek, Munich’s world-class art museum, and then turned left onto the Hessstrasse. It was ten minutes before he caught his first glimpse of the modern tower rising above the Olympic Park. The old Olympic Village lay to the north, not far from the headquarters of BMW and a highly profitable German conglomerate known as the Wolf Group. He found the Connollystrasse and followed it to the squat three-story apartment house at number 31.

The building had long ago been converted into student housing, but in early September 1972 it had been inhabited by members of Israel’s Olympic team. At 4:30 a.m. on September 5, eight Palestinian terrorists dressed in tracksuits scaled an undefended fence. Carrying duffel bags filled with Kalashnikov rifles, Tokarev semiautomatic pistols, and Soviet-made hand grenades, they used a stolen key to unlock the door of apartment 1. Two Israelis, wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg and weight lifter Yossef Romano, were murdered during the