The Secret Servant (4 page)

“You’re not going behind the Iron Curtain,” Shamron said. “With proper cover and a bit of work on that now-famous face of yours, you’ll have no problems getting into the country. The new realities of European travel have made life much easier for Office agents—and, unfortunately, for the terrorists as well. Osama bin Laden could be living quietly in a cottage by the North Sea and the Dutch would never know it.”

Navot reached into his attaché case. The envelope he removed was an old-fashioned model, with a string instead of an aluminum clasp. The Office was one of the most technologically advanced services in the world, but it still used envelopes from the days when Israel had no television.

“It’s an in-and-out job,” Shamron said. “You’ll be home by the weekend. Who knows? Perhaps your wife will be, too.”

“She’s not my wife yet.”

Gabriel took the envelope from Navot’s grasp.
An in-and-out job
, he thought. It sounded nice, but somehow it never turned out that way.

N
ame, please?” asked the front-desk clerk at the Hotel Europa.

“Kiever,” Gabriel replied in German-accented English. “Heinrich Kiever.”

“Ah, yes, here it is. Your room is ready.” There was genuine surprise in her voice. “You have a message, Herr Kiever.”

Gabriel, playing the role of the travel-weary businessman, accepted the small slip of paper with a frown. It stated that his colleague from Heller Enterprises in Zurich had already checked into the hotel and was awaiting his call. Gabriel squeezed the message into a ball and shoved it into the pocket of his overcoat. It was cashmere. The girls in Identity had spared no expense on his wardrobe.

“Your room is on the sixth floor. It’s one of our premier suites.” She handed him an electronic card key and recited a long list of luxurious hotel amenities Gabriel had no intention of using. “Do you require assistance with your bag?”

Gabriel glanced at the bellman, an emaciated youth who looked like he had spent his lunch hour in one of Amsterdam’s notorious brown cafés. “I think I can manage, thank you.”

He boarded a waiting elevator and rode it up to the sixth floor. The door to Suite 612 was located at the end of a corridor, in a small, private alcove. Gabriel ran his fingertips around the jamb, searching for any sign of a foreign object such as a fragment of loose wiring, and held his breath as he inserted the card key into the electronic lock. There was little “premier” about the room he entered, though the view of the canal houses along the Amstel River was one of the finest in the city. A bottle of mediocre champagne was sweating in an ice bucket on the coffee table. The handwritten note said:
Welcome back to the Europa, Herr Kiever
. Strange, because, to the best of Gabriel’s recollection, Herr Kiever had never stayed there before.

He removed a Nokia mobile phone from his coat pocket. It was indeed a telephone, but it contained several features unavailable on ordinary commercial models, such as a device capable of detecting the signals and electrical impulses of concealed transmitters. He held the phone in front of his face and spent the next five minutes padding slowly round the rooms of the suite, watching the power meter for subtle fluctuations. Satisfied the room had not been bugged, he conducted a second search, this one for evidence of a bomb or any other lethal device. Only then did he pick up the phone on the bedside table and dial Room 611. “I’m here,” he said in German, and immediately set down the receiver.

A moment later there was a gentle knock at the door. The man who entered was several years older than Gabriel, small and bookish, with wispy, unkempt gray hair and quick brown eyes. As usual he seemed to be wearing all his clothing at once: a button-down shirt with ascot, a cardigan sweater, a rumpled tweed jacket. “Lovely accommodations,” said Eli Lavon. “Better than that
pensione
where we stayed in Rome the night before the Zwaiter hit in seventy-two. Do you remember it, Gabriel? My God, what a dump.”

“We were posing as university students,” Gabriel reminded him. “We can’t pose as students anymore. I suppose that’s one of the few fringe benefits of growing old.”

Lavon gave Gabriel an elusive smile and lowered himself wearily into an armchair. Even Gabriel, who had known Lavon more than thirty years, sometimes found it hard to imagine that this fussy hypochondriacal little man was without question the finest street surveillance artist the Office had ever produced. They had worked together for the first time during the Wrath of God operation. Lavon, an archaeologist by training, had been an
ayin
, a tracker. When the unit disbanded, he had settled in Vienna and opened a small investigative bureau called Wartime Claims and Inquiries. Operating on a shoestring budget, he had managed to track down millions of dollars in looted Jewish assets and had played a significant role in prying a multibillion-dollar settlement from the banks of Switzerland. He had recently returned to Israel and was teaching biblical archaeology at Hebrew University. In his spare time he lectured on the fine art of physical surveillance at the Academy. No Office recruit ever made it into the field without first spending a few days with the great Eli Lavon.

“Your disguise is quite effective,” Lavon said with professional admiration. “For an instant even I didn’t recognize you.”

Gabriel looked at his reflection in the mirror over the dressing table. He wore a pair of black-framed eyeglasses, contact lenses that turned his green eyes to brown, and a false goatee that accentuated his already-narrow features.

“I would have added a bit more gray to your hair,” Lavon said.

“I have enough already,” Gabriel said. “How did you get roped into this affair?”

“Proximity, I suppose. I was at a conference in Prague delivering a lecture on our dig at Tel Megiddo. As I came off the stage my mobile phone was ringing. You’ll never guess who it was.”

“Trust me, Eli—I can guess.”

“I hear that voice, the voice of God with a murderous Polish accent, telling me to leave Prague for Amsterdam at once.” Lavon shook his head slowly. “Does Shamron really have nothing better to do at his age than worry about a dead
sayan
? He’s lucky to be alive. He should be enjoying his last few years on this earth, but instead he clings to the Office like a drowning man grasping at a life ring.”

“Rosner was his
sayan
,” Gabriel said. “And I’m sure he feels partly responsible for his death.”

“He could have let Uzi handle it. But he doesn’t fully trust Uzi, does he, Gabriel? The old man wanted
you
in Special Ops, not Uzi, and he’s never going to rest until you’re running the place.” Lavon pushed up the sleeve of his tweed jacket and looked at his watch. “Sophie Vanderhaus awaits us. Have you given much thought to how you’re going to play it with her?”

“She’s an intelligent woman. I suspect she already has a good idea about Herr Heller’s true affiliation—and why Rosner always met with him outside the country.”

Lavon frowned. “I must confess I’m not really looking forward to this. I suppose there’s a ritual to these things. When agents die, their secrets have to go with them to the grave. It’s like
tahara
, the washing of the dead. Next time it could be one of us.”

“Promise me something, Eli.”

“Anything.”

“Promise me that if anything happens to me, you’ll be the one who buries all my secrets.”

“It would be my honor.” Lavon patted the pocket of his jacket. “Oh, I nearly forgot this. A
bodel
gave this to me at the airport this morning after I arrived.”

The
bodelim
were Office couriers. The item Lavon had been given was a Beretta 9mm pistol. Gabriel took it from his grasp and slipped it into the waistband of his trousers at the small of his back.

“You’re not really going to bring that, are you?”

“I have enemies, Eli—lots of enemies.”

“Obviously, so did Solomon Rosner.”

“And one of them might still be hanging around his house.”

“Just try not to kill anyone while we’re in Amsterdam, Gabriel. Dead bodies have a way of spoiling an otherwise uneventful trip.”

It was beginning to get dark when Gabriel stepped out of the hotel. He turned to the right and, with Lavon trailing several paces behind, walked the length of the narrow street until he came to an iron bridge. On the opposite side stood Café de Doelen. It was open for business again, and the spot where Solomon Rosner had been standing at the time of his murder was piled high with tulips. There were no mourners or protesters condemning the ritual slaughter of their fellow countryman, only a single banner, hung from the façade of the café, that read
ONE AMSTERDAM
,
ONE PEOPLE
.

“I’ve been staring at it for two days now and I still don’t quite know what it means.”

Gabriel turned around. The words had been spoken by a woman in her late twenties with sandstone-colored hair and pale blue eyes that shone with a calm intelligence.

“I’m Sophie Vanderhaus.” She extended her hand and added primly: “Professor Rosner’s assistant.” She released his hand and gazed at the makeshift memorial. “Quite moving, don’t you think? Even the Dutch press are treating him like a hero now. Too bad they weren’t so glowing in their praise when he was alive. For years they attacked him, all because he had the courage to say the things they chose to ignore. In my judgment they are complicit in his murder. They are as guilty as the extremist imams who filled Muhammad Hamza’s head with hate.” She turned and looked at Gabriel. “Come,” she said. “The house is this way.”

They set off down the Staalstraat together. Gabriel glanced over his shoulder and saw Lavon start after them. Sophie Vanderhaus gazed down at the cobbles, as if organizing her thoughts.

“It’s been five days since his murder,” she said, “and not a single Muslim leader has bothered to condemn it. In fact, given a chance to do so by the Dutch media, they have chosen to blame it on
him
. Where are these so-called moderate Muslims one always hears about in the press? Do they exist or are they merely figments of our imagination? If one insults the Prophet Muhammad, our Muslim countrymen pour into the streets in a sacred rage and threaten us with beheading. But when one of them commits murder in the Prophet’s name…”

Her voice trailed off. Gabriel completed the thought for her.

“The silence is deafening.”

“Well put,” she said. “But you didn’t come to Amsterdam to listen to a lecture by me. You have a job to do.” She scrutinized him carefully for a moment while they walked side by side in the narrow street. “Do you know, Herr Kiever, it was exactly a year ago that Professor Rosner first told me about his relationship with a man named Rudolf Heller and what I was to do in the event anything ever happened to him. Needless to say, I hoped this day would never come.”

“I understand you and Professor Rosner were very close.”

“He was like a father to me. I had a dozen other job offers when I completed my degree—jobs that paid much more than the Center for European Security Studies—but I chose to work for Professor Rosner for a pittance instead.”

“You’re a historian?”

She nodded. “While I was researching my thesis, I learned that we Dutch have a habit of trying to reach accommodation with murderous ideologies, be it National Socialism or Islamic fascism. I wanted to help break that cycle. Working for Professor Rosner gave me that chance.” She pushed a stray lock of hair from her forehead and looked at Gabriel. “I was at Professor Rosner’s side for five years, Herr Kiever. I had to endure the taunts and threats as well. And I believe that entitles me to ask a few questions before we start.”

“I’m afraid asking too many questions about who I am and why I’m here will make your life more complicated and dangerous than it already is.”

“Will you permit me to posit a hypothesis?”

“If you insist.”

“I don’t believe Herr Rudolf Heller is Swiss. And I certainly don’t believe he’s a venture capitalist who had an interest in supporting the work of a terrorism analyst in Amsterdam.”

“Really?”

“Professor Rosner didn’t talk much about his feelings toward Israel. He knew it would only make him more radioactive in Amsterdam than he already was. But he was a Zionist. He believed in Israel and the right of the Jewish people to a homeland. And I suspect that if a clever Israeli intelligence officer came along and made him the right sort of offer, he would have done almost anything to help.”

She stopped walking and looked at Gabriel for a moment with one eyebrow raised, as if giving him a chance to respond.

“My name is Heinrich Kiever,” he said. “I’m a colleague of Herr Rudolf Heller from Zurich, and I’ve come to Amsterdam to review the private papers of Professor Solomon Rosner.”

She capitulated, though judging from her expression she remained deeply skeptical of his cover story. Gabriel didn’t blame her. It was hardly airtight.

“I hope you’re not planning on leaving Amsterdam any time soon,” she said. “At last estimate, we had more than a hundred thousand pages of documents in our archives.”

“I brought help.”

“Where?”

Gabriel nodded toward Lavon, who was gazing into a shopwindow twenty yards behind them.

“Since when do Zurich venture capitalists employ professional surveillance men?” She set off down the Groenburgwal. “Come on, Herr
Kiever
. You have a long night ahead of you.”

Her original estimate of Rosner’s archives proved wildly optimistic. Gabriel, after conducting a brief tour of the canal house, reckoned the true number of pages ran closer to a quarter million. There were files in Rosner’s office and files in Sophie’s. Files lined the hallway, and there was a dank chamber filled with files in the cellar. And then, of course, there was all the material contained on the hard drive of Rosner’s computer. So much for Shamron’s prediction that they would be back in Jerusalem by the weekend.

They started in Rosner’s office and worked as a threesome. Gabriel and Lavon, the restorer and the archaeologist, sat side by side at Rosner’s desk, while Sophie placed the files before them one by one, providing a bit of background where appropriate, translating the odd passage when necessary. Files of interest or of a sensitive nature were separated out and packed into cardboard boxes for shipment to King Saul Boulevard. By nine o’clock they had filled four boxes and found not a single reference to Ari Shamron, Herr Rudolf Heller, or the Office. Rosner, it seemed, had been a careful asset. He also had been a meticulous researcher and collector of intelligence. Contained in the rooms of the old canal house on the Groenburgwal was a remarkably detailed and frightening portrait of the radical Islamic networks operating in Amsterdam and beyond.

By ten o’clock they were all famished. Unwilling to suspend work, they decided on takeaway. Gabriel voted for kebabs, Sophie for Indonesian, and Lavon for Thai. After ten minutes of spirited debate, they resorted to drawing a name from one of Rosner’s old felt hats. Sophie did the honors. “Thai,” she said, smiling at Lavon. “Shall we draw again to see who has to go pick it up?”