The Order (Gabriel Allon #20) - Daniel Silva Page 0,69

first moments of the siege. Nine others were taken hostage.

For the remainder of that day, as a global television audience watched in horror, German authorities negotiated with two heavily disguised terrorists—one known as Issa, the other Tony—while across the street the Games continued. Finally, at ten p.m., the hostages were flown by helicopter to Fürstenfeldbruck Air Base, where German police had put in place an ill-conceived rescue operation. It ended with the death of all nine Israelis.

Within hours of the massacre, Israeli prime minister Golda Meir ordered a legendary Office agent named Ari Shamron to “send forth the boys.” The operation was code-named Wrath of God, a phrase chosen by Shamron to give his undertaking the patina of divine sanction. One of the boys was a gifted young painter from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design named Gabriel Allon. Another was Eli Lavon, a promising biblical archaeologist. In the Hebrew-based lexicon of the team, Lavon was an ayin, a tracker. Gabriel was an aleph, an assassin. For three years they stalked their prey across Western Europe and the Middle East, killing at night and in broad daylight, living in fear that at any moment they might be arrested by local authorities and charged as murderers. In all, twelve men died at their hands. Gabriel personally killed six of the terrorists with a .22-caliber Beretta pistol. Whenever possible, he shot his victims eleven times, one for each Jew murdered at Munich. When finally he returned to Israel, his temples were gray. Lavon was left with numerous stress disorders, including a notoriously fickle stomach that troubled him to this day.

He crept up on Gabriel without a sound and joined him in front of Connollystrasse 31.

“I wouldn’t do that again if I were you, Eli. You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you.”

“I tried to make a bit of noise.”

“Try harder next time.”

Lavon looked up toward the balcony of apartment 1. “Come here often?”

“Actually, it’s been a while.”

“How long?”

“A hundred years,” said Gabriel distantly.

“I come here every time I’m in Munich. And I always think the same thing.”

“What’s that, Eli?”

“Our Olympic team should never have been assigned to this building. It was too isolated. We expressed our concerns to the Germans a few weeks before the Games began, but they assured us our athletes would be safe. Unfortunately, they neglected to tell us that German intelligence had already received a tip from a Palestinian informant that the Israeli team had been targeted.”

“It must have slipped their minds.”

“Why didn’t they warn us? Why didn’t they take steps to protect our athletes?”

“You tell me.”

“They didn’t tell us,” said Lavon, “because they didn’t want anything to spoil their postwar coming-out party, least of all a threat against the descendants of the same people they had tried to exterminate just thirty years before. Remember, the German intelligence and security services were founded by men like Reinhard Gehlen. Men who had worked for Hitler and the Nazis. Men of the right who hated communism and Jews in equal measure. It’s no wonder they were attracted to someone like Andreas Estermann.” He turned to Gabriel. “Did you happen to notice the last job he held before his retirement?”

“Head of Department Two, the counterextremism division.”

“So why is he spending so much time on the phone with the likes of Axel Brünner? And why does he have the private cell number of every far-right leader in Europe?” Lavon paused. “And why did he turn off his phone for three hours in Bonn the other night?”

“Maybe he has a girlfriend there.”

“Estermann? He’s a choirboy.”

“A doctrinaire choirboy.”

Lavon lifted his gaze once more toward the facade of the building. A light was burning in the window of apartment 1. “Do you ever imagine how differently our lives would have turned out if it hadn’t happened?”

“Munich?”

“No,” answered Lavon. “All of it. Two thousand years of hatred. We’d be as numerous as all the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore, just as God promised Abraham. I’d be living in a grand apartment in the First District of Vienna, a leader in my field, a man of distinction. I’d spend my afternoons sipping coffee and eating strudel at Café Sacher, and my evenings listening to Mozart and Haydn. Occasionally, I’d visit an art gallery and see works by a famous Berlin painter named Gabriel Frankel, the son of Irene Frankel, the grandson of Viktor Frankel, perhaps the greatest German painter of the twentieth century. Who knows? Perhaps I might even be wealthy enough to