The Order (Gabriel Allon #20) - Daniel Silva Page 0,79

was largely unfurnished. In the outbuilding, however, was a ten-year-old Mitsubishi light-duty cargo truck loaded with two dozen drums of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, nitromethane, and Tovex, the makings of an ANNM bomb.

The truck was registered to a Hamid Fawzi, a refugee, originally from Damascus, who had settled in Frankfurt after Syria erupted into civil war. Or so claimed his social media pages, which were updated frequently. An engineer by training, Fawzi worked as an IT specialist for a German consulting firm, which was also owned by OSH Holdings. His wife, Asma, wore a full-face veil whenever she left their apartment. They had two children, a daughter named Salma and a boy named Mohammad.

According to Navot’s intelligence, a single operative was scheduled to arrive at the property that morning at ten o’clock. He could not say whether it would be Hamid Fawzi. He was quite certain, however, about the target: the immensely popular Cologne Christmas market now under way at the historic cathedral.

Gerhardt Schmidt had a long list of questions he wanted to ask Navot, but there wasn’t time for anything more than an expression of profound gratitude. After hanging up, he immediately rang the interior minister, who in turn rang the chancellor, along with Schmidt’s counterpart at the Bundespolizei. The first officers arrived at the farmhouse at eight thirty. A few minutes after nine, they were joined by four teams from GSG 9, Germany’s elite tactical and counterterrorism unit.

The officers made no attempt to enter the outbuilding, which was sealed with a heavy-duty lock. Instead, they concealed themselves in the surrounding woods and waited. At ten a.m. sharp, a Volkswagen Passat estate car came bumping up the property’s rutted drive. The man behind the wheel wore dark glasses and a woolen watch cap. His hands were gloved.

He parked the Volkswagen outside the farmhouse and walked over to the outbuilding. The GSG 9 officers waited until he had opened the lock before emerging from the cover of the trees. Startled, the man reached inside his coat, apparently for a weapon, but wisely stopped when he saw the size of the force arrayed against him. This came as something of a surprise to the GSG 9 officers. They had been trained to expect jihadist terrorists to fight to the death.

The officers were surprised a second time when, after handcuffing the man, they removed his dark glasses and woolen cap. Blond and blue-eyed, he looked as though he had stepped off a Nazi propaganda poster. A rapid search found him to be in possession of a Glock 9mm pistol, three mobile phones, several thousand euros in cash, and an Austrian passport issued in the name Klaus Jäger. The Bundespolizei immediately contacted their brethren in Vienna, who knew Jäger well. He was a former Austrian police officer who had been relieved of duty for consorting with known neo-Nazis.

It was at this point, at half past ten, that the story broke on the website of Die Welt, Germany’s most respected newspaper. Based on an anonymous source, it stated that the Bundespolizei, acting on intelligence developed by Bf V chief Gerhardt Schmidt, had arrested one of the men responsible for the bombings in Berlin and Hamburg. He was not a member of the Islamic State, as previously suspected, but a known neo-Nazi with ties to Axel Brünner and the far-right National Democratic Party. The attacks, reported Die Welt, were part of a cynical plot to drive up Brünner’s support before the general election.

Within minutes, Germany was thrown into political turmoil. Gerhardt Schmidt, however, was suddenly the most popular man in the country. After hanging up with the chancellor, he rang Uzi Navot in Tel Aviv.

“Mazel tov, Gerhardt. I just saw the news.”

“I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you.”

“I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

“There’s only one problem,” said Schmidt. “I need to know the name of your source.”

“I’ll never tell. But if I were you, I’d take a hard look at OSH Holdings. I suspect it will lead you to an interesting place.”

“Where?”

“I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise.”

“Did you and Allon know that Brünner and the far right were behind the bombings?”

“The far right?” Navot sounded incredulous. “Who could imagine such a thing?”

44

BAVARIA, GERMANY

THE SOURCE OF UZI NAVOT’S remarkably accurate intelligence left Munich at 10:15 a.m. in the trunk of an Audi sedan. He remained there, bound and gagged, until the car reached the Bavarian village of Irschenberg, where he was placed in the backseat next to Gabriel. Together they listened to the breaking news