“You might say that.”
Lavon raised a tiny hand. “Do tell.”
“We should probably wait until the others arrive.”
“They’re on their way. All of them.” Lavon’s lighter flared. “I assume this has something to do with the unfortunate passing of His Holiness Pope Paul the Seventh.”
Gabriel nodded.
“I take it His Holiness did not die of natural causes.”
“No,” said Gabriel. “He did not.”
“Do we have a suspect?”
“A Catholic order based in Canton Zug.”
Lavon stared at Gabriel through a cloud of smoke. “The Order of St. Helena?”
“You’ve heard of them?”
“Unfortunately, I dealt with the Order in a previous life.”
During a lengthy hiatus from the Office, Lavon had run a small investigative agency in Vienna called Wartime Claims and Inquiries. Operating on a shoestring budget, he had tracked down millions of dollars’ worth of looted Holocaust assets. He left Vienna after a bomb destroyed his office and killed two of his employees, both young women. The perpetrator, a former SS officer named Erich Radek, had died in an Israeli prison cell. Gabriel was the one who put him there.
“It was a case involving a Viennese family named Feldman,” explained Lavon. “The patriarch was Samuel Feldman, a well-to-do exporter of high-quality textiles. In the autumn of 1937, as storm clouds were gathering over Austria, two priests from the Order came calling on Feldman at his apartment in the First District. One of the priests was the Order’s founder, Father Ulrich Schiller.”
“And what did Father Schiller want from Samuel Feldman?”
“Money. What else?”
“What was he offering in return?”
“Baptismal certificates. Feldman was desperate, so he gave Father Schiller a substantial sum of cash and other valuables, including several paintings.”
“And when the Nazis rolled into Vienna in March 1938?”
“Father Schiller and the promised baptismal certificates were nowhere to be found. Feldman and most of his family were deported to the Lublin district of Poland, where they were murdered by Einsatzgruppen. One child survived the war in hiding in Vienna, a daughter named Isabel. She came to me after the Swiss banking scandal broke and told me the story.”
“What did you do?”
“I made an appointment to see Bishop Hans Richter, the superior general of the Order of St. Helena. We met at its medieval priory in Menzingen. A nasty piece of work, the bishop. There were moments when I had to remind myself that I was actually speaking to a Roman Catholic cleric. Needless to say, I left empty-handed.”
“Did you let it drop?”
“Me? Of course not. And within a year, I found four other cases of the Order soliciting donations from Jews in exchange for promises of protection. Bishop Richter wouldn’t see me again, so I turned over my material to an Italian investigative reporter named Alessandro Ricci. He found a few more cases, including a wealthy Roman Jew who gave the Order several paintings and valuable rare books in 1938. I’m afraid his name escapes me.”
“Emanuele Giordano.”
Lavon eyed Gabriel over the ember of his cigarette. “How is it possible you know that name?”
“I met with Alessandro Ricci last night in Rome. He told me the Order of St. Helena is planning to steal the conclave and elect one of their members the next pope.”
“Knowing the Order, I’m sure it involves money.”
“It does.”
“Is that why they killed the pope?”
“No,” said Gabriel. “They killed him because he wanted to give me a book.”
“What kind of book?”
“Do you remember when we found the ruins of Solomon’s Temple?”
Lavon absently rubbed his chest. “How could I forget?”
Gabriel smiled. “This is better.”
THE OFFICE, LIKE THE Roman Catholic Church, was guided by ancient doctrine and dogma. Sacred and inviolable, it dictated that members of a large operational team travel to their destination by different routes. The exigencies of the situation, however, required all eight members of the team to journey to Munich on the same El Al flight. Nevertheless, they staggered their arrival at the safe house, if only to avoid attracting unwanted attention from the neighbors.
The first to arrive was Yossi Gavish, the tweedy, British-born head of Research. He was followed by Mordecai and Oded, a pair of all-purpose field hands, and a kid named Ilan who knew how to make the computers work. Next came Yaakov Rossman and Dina Sarid. Yaakov was the head of Special Ops. Dina was a human database of Palestinian and Islamic terrorism who possessed an uncanny knack for spotting connections others missed. Both spoke fluent German.
Mikhail Abramov wandered in around noon. Tall and lanky, with pale bloodless skin and eyes like glacial ice, he had immigrated to Israel from Russia as a teenager and joined the Sayeret Matkal, the IDF’s elite special operations unit. Often described as Gabriel without a conscience, he had personally assassinated several top terror masterminds from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. He now carried out similar assignments on behalf of the Office, though his extraordinary talents were not limited to the gun. A year earlier he had led a team into Tehran and stolen Iran’s entire nuclear archives.
He was accompanied by Natalie Mizrahi, who also happened to be his wife. Born and educated in France, fluent in the Algerian dialect of Arabic, she had traded a promising medical career for the dangerous life of an undercover Office field agent. Her first assignment took her to Raqqa, the capital of the short-lived caliphate of the Islamic State, where she penetrated ISIS’s external terrorism network. Were it not for Gabriel and Mikhail, the operation would have been her last.
Like the other members of the team, Natalie had only the vaguest idea why she had been ordered to Munich. Now, in the half-light of the formal drawing room, she listened intently as Gabriel told the team the story of a well-deserved family vacation that was not to be. Summoned to Rome by Archbishop Luigi Donati, he had learned that Pope Paul VII, a man who had done much to undo the Catholic Church’s terrible legacy of anti-Semitism, had died under mysterious circumstances. Though skeptical that the Holy Father had been murdered, Gabriel had nonetheless agreed to use the resources of the Office to undertake an informal investigation. It led him to Florence, where he witnessed the brutal killing of a missing Swiss Guard, and then to a cottage outside Fribourg, where an unfinished letter fell from a framed picture of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.
The letter concerned a book His Holiness had discovered in the Vatican Secret Archives. A book purportedly based on the memoirs of the Roman prefect of Judea who sentenced Jesus to death by crucifixion. A book that contradicted the accounts of Jesus’ death contained in the canonical Gospels, accounts that were the seedbed of two thousand years of sometimes murderous anti-Semitism.
The book was missing, but the men who took it were hiding in plain sight. They were members of a reactionary and secretive Catholic order founded in southern Germany by a priest who found much to admire in the politics of the European far right, especially National Socialism. The spiritual descendants of this priest, whose name was Ulrich Schiller, planned to steal the approaching papal conclave and elect one of their own as the next supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church. As chief of the Office, Gabriel had determined that such a development would not be in the interests of the State of Israel or Europe’s 1.5 million Jews. Therefore, it was his intention to help his friend Luigi Donati steal the conclave back.