To Eli Lavon, the story of Jonas Wolf’s spectacular rise sounded too good to be true. There was, for a start, the loan Wolf had received to purchase his first company. Lavon had a hunch, based on hard-won experience, that Wolf’s lender had been a Canton Zug–based concern known as the Order of St. Helena. Furthermore, Lavon was of the opinion—again, it was merely well-informed conjecture—that the Wolf Group was far larger than advertised.

Because it was an entirely private company, one that had never received a single loan from a single German bank, Lavon’s options for traditional financial inquiry were limited. Estermann’s phone, however, opened many doors within the firm’s computer network that might otherwise have remained closed, even to the cybersleuths at Unit 8200. Shortly after eight o’clock that evening, they tunneled into Jonas Wolf’s personal database and found the keys to the kingdom, a two-hundred-page document detailing the company’s global holdings and the staggering income they generated.

“Two and a half billion in pure profit last year alone,” announced Lavon. “And where do you think it all goes?”

That evening the team set aside its work long enough to share a traditional family meal. Mikhail Abramov and Natalie Mizrahi were absent, however, for they dined at Café Adagio in the Beethovenplatz. It was located in the basement level of a yellow building on the square’s northwestern flank. By day it served bistro fare, but at night it was one of the neighborhood’s most popular bars. Mikhail and Natalie pronounced the food mediocre but judged the likelihood of successfully abducting a patron to be quite high.

“Three stars on the Michelin scale,” quipped Mikhail upon their return to the safe house. “If Estermann comes to Café Adagio alone, he leaves in the back of a van.”

The team took delivery of the vehicle in question, a Mercedes transit van, at nine the following morning, along with two Audi A8 sedans, two BMW motor scooters, a set of false German registration plates, four Jericho .45-caliber pistols, an Uzi Pro compact submachine gun, and a 9mm Beretta with a walnut grip.

At which point the tension in the safe house seemed to rise by several notches. As was often the case, Gabriel’s mood darkened as the zero hour drew near. Mikhail reminded him that a year earlier, in a warehouse in a drab commercial district of Tehran, a sixteen-member team had blowtorched its way into thirty-two safes and removed several hundred computer discs and millions of pages of documents. The team had then loaded the material into a cargo truck and driven it to the shore of the Caspian Sea, where a boat had been waiting. The operation had shocked the world and proved once again that the Office could strike at will, even in the capital of its most implacable foe.

“And how many Iranians did you have to kill in order to get out of the country alive?”

“Details, details,” said Mikhail dismissively. “The point is, we can do this with our eyes closed.”

“I’d rather you do it with your eyes open. It will substantially increase our chances of success.”

By midday Gabriel had managed to convince himself that they were doomed to failure, that he would spend the rest of his life in a German prison cell for crimes too numerous to recall, an ignoble end to a career against which all others would be measured. Eli Lavon accurately diagnosed the source of Gabriel’s despair, for he was suffering from the same malady. It was Munich, thought Lavon. And it was the book.

It was never far from their thoughts, especially Lavon’s. There was not one member of the team whose life had not been altered by the longest hatred. Nearly all had lost relatives to the fires of the Holocaust. Some had been born only because one member of a family had found the will to survive. Like Isabel Feldman, the only surviving child of Samuel Feldman, who handed over a small fortune in cash and valuables to the Order of St. Helena in exchange for false baptismal certificates and false promises of protection.

Another such woman was Irene Frankel. Born in Berlin, she was deported to Auschwitz in the autumn of 1942. Her parents were gassed upon arrival, but Irene Frankel left Auschwitz on the Death March in January 1945. She arrived in the new State of Israel in 1948. There she met a man from Munich, a writer, an intellectual, who had escaped to Palestine before the war. In Germany his name had been Greenberg, but in Israel he had taken the name Allon. After marrying, they vowed to have six children, one for each million murdered, but a single child was all her womb could bear. She named the child Gabriel, the messenger of God, the interpreter of Daniel’s visions.

At two o’clock they all realized it had been several minutes since anyone had seen him or heard his voice. A rapid search of the safe house revealed no trace of him, and a call to his phone received no answer. Unit 8200 confirmed the device was powered on and that it was moving through the Englischer Garten at a walking pace. Eli Lavon was confident he knew where it was headed. The child of Irene Frankel wanted to see where it had happened. Lavon couldn’t blame him. He was suffering from the same malady.

38

MUNICH

IN JULY 1935, TWO AND a half years after electorally seizing control of Germany, Adolf Hitler formally declared Munich “the Capital of the Movement.” The city’s ties to National Socialism were undeniable. The Nazi Party was formed in Munich in the turbulent years after Germany’s defeat in World War I. And it was in Munich, in the autumn of 1923, that Hitler led the abortive Beer Hall Putsch that resulted in his brief incarceration at Landsberg Prison. There he penned the first volume of Mein Kampf, the rambling manifesto in which he described Jews as germs that needed to be exterminated. During his first year as chancellor, the year in which he transformed Germany into a totalitarian dictatorship, the book sold more than a million copies.

Throughout the fifteen cataclysmic years of the Nazi era, Hitler traveled to Munich frequently. He maintained a large, art-filled apartment at Prinzregentenplatz 16 and commissioned the construction of a personal office building overlooking the Königsplatz. Known as the Führerbau it contained living quarters for Hitler and his deputy, Rudolf Hess, and a cavernous central hall with twin stone staircases that led to a conference room. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement in the Führerbau on September 30, 1938. Upon his return to London, he predicted the accord would deliver “peace in our time.” A year later the Wehrmacht invaded Poland, plunging the world into war and setting in motion the chain of events that would lead to the destruction of Europe’s Jews.

Much of central Munich was leveled by a pair of devastating Allied bombing raids in April 1944, but somehow the Führerbau survived. Immediately after the war, the Allies used it as a storage facility for looted art. It was now the home of a respected school of music and theater, where pianists, cellists, violinists, and actors perfected their craft in rooms where murderers once walked. Bicycles lined the building’s leaden facade, and at the foot of the main steps stood two bored-looking Munich police officers. Neither paid any heed to the man of medium height and build who paused to review a schedule of upcoming public recitals.

He continued past the Alte Pinakothek, Munich’s world-class art museum, and then turned left onto the Hessstrasse. It was ten minutes before he caught his first glimpse of the modern tower rising above the Olympic Park. The old Olympic Village lay to the north, not far from the headquarters of BMW and a highly profitable German conglomerate known as the Wolf Group. He found the Connollystrasse and followed it to the squat three-story apartment house at number 31.