American Embassy and have a chat with the local head of station.”
“About what?”
“According to the file from the Staatsarchiv, Vogel worked for the Americans in Austria during the occupation period. I’ve asked our friends in Langley to have a look through their files and see if Vogel’s name pops up. It’s a long shot, but maybe we’ll get lucky.”
Gabriel looked down at his mother’s testimony:I will not tell all the things I saw. I cannot. I owe this much to the dead…
“Your mother was a very brave woman, Gabriel. That’s why I chose you. I knew you came from excellent stock.”
“She was much braver than I am.”
“Yes,” Shamron agreed. “She was braver than all of us.”
BRUCE CRAWFORD’S REAL occupation was one of the worst-kept secrets in Israel. The tall, patrician American was the chief of the CIA’s Tel Aviv station. Declared to both the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority, he often served as a conduit between the two warring sides. Seldom was the night Crawford’s telephone didn’t ring at some hideous hour. He was tired, and looked it.
He greeted Shamron just inside the gates of the embassy on Haraykon Street and escorted him into the building. Crawford’s office was large and, for Shamron’s taste, overdecorated. It seemed the office of a corporate vice president rather than the lair of a spy, but then that was the American way. Shamron sank into a leather chair and accepted a glass of chilled water with lemon from a secretary. He considered lighting a Turkish cigarette, then noticed the NO SMOKING sign prominently displayed on the front of Crawford’s desk.
Crawford seemed in no hurry to get down to the matter at hand. Shamron had expected this. There was an unwritten rule among spies: when one asks a friend for a favor, one must be prepared to sing for his supper. Shamron, because he was technically out of the game, could offer nothing tangible, only the advice and the wisdom of a man who had made many mistakes.
Finally, after an hour, Crawford said, “About that Vogel thing.”
The American’s voice trailed off. Shamron, taking note of the tinge of failure in Crawford’s voice, leaned forward in his chair expectantly. Crawford played for time by removing a paper clip from his special magnetic dispenser and industriously straightening it.
“We had a look through our own files,” Crawford said, his gaze downward at his work. “We even sent a team out to Maryland to dig through the Archives annex. I’m afraid we struck out.”
“Struck out?” Shamron considered the use of American sports colloquialisms inappropriate for a business so vital as espionage. Agents, in Shamron’s world, did not strike out, fumble the ball, or make slam dunks. There was only success or failure, and the price of failure, in a neighborhood like the Middle East, was usually blood. “What does this meanexactly?”
“It means,” Crawford said pedantically, “that our search produced nothing. I’m sorry, Ari, but sometimes, that’s the way it goes with these things.”
He held up his straightened paper clip and examined it carefully, as though proud of his accomplishment.
GABRIEL WAS WAITING IN the back seat of Shamron’s Peugeot.
“How did it go?”
Shamron lit a cigarette and answered the question.
“Do you believe him?”
“You know, if he’d told me that they’d found a routine personnel file or a security clearance background report, I might have believed him. Butnothing? Who does he think he’s talking to? I’m insulted, Gabriel. I truly am.”
“You think the Americans know something about Vogel?”
“Bruce Crawford just confirmed it for us.” Shamron glared at his stainless-steel watch. “Damn! It took him an hour to screw up the nerve to lie to me, and now you’re going to miss your flight.”
Gabriel looked down at the telephone in the console. “Do it,” he murmured. “I dare you.”
Shamron snatched up the telephone and dialed. “This is Shamron,” he snapped. “There’s an El Al flight leaving Lod for Rome in thirty minutes. It has just developed a mechanical problem that will require a one-hour delay in its departure. Understand?”
TWO HOURS LATER, Bruce Crawford’s telephone purred. He brought the receiver to his ear. He recognized the voice. It was the surveillance man he had assigned to follow Shamron. A dangerous game, following the former chief of the Office on his own soil, but Crawford was under orders.
“After he left the embassy, he went to Lod.”
“What was he doing at the airport?”
“Dropping off a passenger.”
“Did you recognize him?”
The surveillance man indicated that he did. Without mentioning the passenger’s name, he managed to communicate the fact that the man in question was a noteworthy Office agent, recently active in a central European city.
“Are you sure it was him?”
“No doubt about it.”
“Where was he going?”
Crawford, after hearing the answer, severed the connection. A moment later, he was seated before his computer, punching out a secure cable to Headquarters. The text was direct and terse, just the way the addressee liked it.
Elijah is heading to Rome. Arrives tonight on El Al flight from Tel Aviv.
18 ROME
GABRIEL WANTED TO meet the man from the Vatican someplace other than his office on the top floor of the Apostolic Palace. They settled on Piperno, an old restaurant on a quiet square near the Tiber, a few streets over from the ancient Jewish ghetto. It was the kind of December afternoon only Rome can produce, and Gabriel, arriving first, arranged for a table outside in a patch of warm, brilliant sunlight.
A few minutes later, a priest entered the square and headed toward the restaurant at a determined clip. He was tall and lean and as handsome as an Italian movie idol. The cut of his black clerical suit and Roman collar suggested that, while chaste, he was not without personal or professional vanity. And with good reason. Monsignor Luigi Donati, the private secretary of His Holiness Pope Paul VII, was arguably the second most powerful man in the Roman Catholic Church.
There was a cold toughness about Luigi Donati that made it difficult for Gabriel to imagine him baptizing babies or anointing the sick in some dusty Umbrian hilltown. His dark eyes radiated a fierce and uncompromising intelligence, while the stubborn set of his jaw revealed that he was a dangerous man to cross. Gabriel knew this to be true from direct experience. A year earlier, a case had led him to the Vatican and into Donati’s capable hands, and together they had destroyed a grave threat to Pope Paul VII. Luigi Donati owed Gabriel a favor. Gabriel was betting Donati was a man who paid his debts.
Donati was also a man who enjoyed nothing more than whiling away a few hours at a sunlit Roman cafe. His demanding style had won him few friends within the Curia and, like his boss, he slipped the bonds of the Vatican whenever possible. He had seized Gabriel’s invitation to lunch like a drowning man grasping hold of a lifeline. Gabriel had the distinct impression Luigi Donati was desperately lonely. Sometimes Gabriel wondered whether Donati regretted the life he had chosen.
The priest lit a cigarette with a gold executive lighter. “How’s business?”
“I’m working on another Bellini. The Crisostomo altarpiece.”
“Yes, I know.”
Before becoming Pope Paul VII, Cardinal Pietro Lucchesi had been the Patriarch of Venice. Luigi Donati had been at his side. His ties to Venice remained strong. There was little that happened in his old archdiocese that he didn’t know about.
“I trust Francesco Tiepolo is treating you well.”
