Daniel Silva - The Fallen Angel

“Don’t worry,” Gabriel said, smiling. “The others will be here soon.”

It took the better part of the morning for Personnel to track down the remaining members of Gabriel’s team and cast them downward into his windowless little dungeon. For the most part, the extractions went smoothly, but in a handful of cases they encountered unexpectedly stiff local resistance. All complaints were forwarded directly to Uzi Navot, who made it clear he would tolerate no dissent. “This is not the Arab world,” he told one disgruntled division chief. “This is the Office. And we are still totalitarians.”

They arrived at irregular intervals, like members of an infiltration team returning to base after a successful night raid. First came Yaakov Rossman, a pockmarked former counterterrorism officer from Shabak, Israel’s internal security service, who was now running agents in Syria and Lebanon. Then it was a pair of all-purpose field hands named Oded and Mordecai, followed by Rimona Stern, a former military intelligence officer who now dealt with issues related to Iran’s nuclear program. A Rubenesque woman with sandstone-colored hair, Rimona also happened to be Shamron’s niece. Gabriel had known her since she was a child. His fondest memories of Rimona were of a fearless young girl on a kick scooter careening down the steep drive of her famous uncle’s house.

Next there appeared in the doorway a petite, dark-haired woman named Dina Sarid. A human database, she could recite the time, place, perpetrators, and casualty toll of every act of terrorism committed against Israeli and Western targets, including the long list of atrocities carried out by the highly skilled murderers of Hezbollah. For many years, she focused her considerable analytic skills on Imad Mughniyah, Hezbollah’s military commander and high priest of terror. Indeed, thanks in large measure to Dina’s work, Mughniyah met his much-deserved end in Damascus in 2008 when a bomb exploded beneath his car. Dina marked Mughniyah’s demise by paying a visit to the graves of her mother and two of her sisters. They were killed on October 19, 1994, when a suicide bomber from Hamas, Iran’s other proxy, detonated himself on a Number 5 bus in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street. Dina was seriously wounded in the attack and still walked with a slight limp.

As usual, Mikhail Abramov arrived last. Lanky and fair with a fine-boned face and eyes the color of glacial ice, he had immigrated to Israel from Russia as a teenager and joined the Sayeret Matkal, the IDF’s elite special operations unit. Once described by Ari Shamron as “Gabriel without a conscience,” he had personally assassinated several of the top terror masterminds from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. He now carried out similar missions on behalf of the Office, though his enormous talents were not limited strictly to the gun.

Within the corridors and conference rooms of King Saul Boulevard, the nine men and women gathered in Room 456C were known by the code name “Barak”—the Hebrew word for lightning—for their ability to gather and strike quickly. They had fought together, often under conditions of unbearable stress, on secret battlefields stretching from Moscow to the Caribbean to the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia. Gabriel had been lucky to survive their last operation, but now he stood before them once again, looking none the worse for wear, holding them spellbound with a story. It featured a museum curator whose father had been a tomb robber, a priest with a dangerous secret, and a glorified mobster named Carlo Marchese who was doing business with the world’s most dangerous terrorist group. The goal of the operation, said Gabriel, would be simple. They were going to assemble a dossier that would destroy Carlo and in the process blow a hole in Hezbollah’s bottom line. But it wouldn’t be sufficient simply to prove that Carlo Marchese was a criminal. They were going to find the cordata , the rope, linking him directly to Hezbollah. And then they were going to wrap it around his neck.

They were a family of sorts, and like all families there were petty jealousies, unspoken resentments, and various other forms of sibling dysfunction. Even so, they managed to divide themselves into subunits and settle down to work with a minimum of bickering. Yossi, Chiara, and Mordecai saw to Carlo, while responsibility for Hezbollah’s criminal fund-raising networks fell to Dina, Rimona, Yaakov, and Mikhail. Gabriel and Eli Lavon floated somewhere in between, for it was their task to find the nexus between the two organizations—or, as Lavon put it, the wedding band that joined Carlo and Hezbollah in criminal matrimony.

Before long, the walls of Room 456C reflected the unique nature of their undertaking. On one side were the outlines of Carlo Marchese’s overt business empire; on the other, the known elements of Hezbollah, Inc. It had but one task—to supply a steady stream of money to the most dangerous terrorist group the world had ever known. It was Hezbollah, not al-Qaeda, that first turned human beings into bombs, and Hezbollah that first developed a truly global capability. Indeed, on two occasions, it was able to reach its tentacles across the Atlantic and attack targets in Buenos Aires—first in 1992, when it bombed the Israeli Embassy, killing twenty-nine people, and again in 1994, when it destroyed the AMIA Jewish community center, leaving another ninety-five dead. Hezbollah’s ranks were filled with several thousand highly trained terrorists, many hidden within the worldwide Lebanese diaspora, and its vast arsenal of weaponry included several Scuds, making it the only terrorist group in the world to possess ballistic missiles. In short, Hezbollah had the ability to carry out a cataclysmic terrorist attack at the time and place of its choosing. All it required was the blessing of its Shiite clerical masters in Tehran.

It was Allah who provided Hezbollah’s inspiration, but mere mortals saw to its financial needs. Their faces scowled from Dina’s side of the room. At the center of the web she placed the Lebanon Byzantine Bank. Then, with the help of Unit 8200, she assembled a communication matrix and phone tree that stretched from Beirut to London to the lawless Tri-Border Area of South America. Lebanon Byzantine Bank—or LBB in the lexicon of the team—was the glue that held it all together. Thanks to the cybersleuths from Unit 8200, the team perused its ledger sheets at will. Indeed, Yaakov joked that he knew more about LBB’s operations and investments than even the bank’s president. It quickly became apparent that the institution—“And I do use that term loosely,” scoffed Yaakov—was little more than a front for Hezbollah. “Follow the money,” Gabriel instructed the team, “and with a bit of luck, it will lead us to Hezbollah’s man inside the network.”

For the most part, Gabriel spent those days putting himself through a crash course on the global trade in illicit antiquities—specifically, how glittering treasures from the past made their way from the dirty hands of tomb robbers and thieves onto the legitimate market. Much of the work involved a mind-numbing review of monographs, catalogues, museum databases, auction house records, and published inventories of antiquities dealers around the world. But occasionally he would head over to the Rockefeller Museum with Eli Lavon in tow to sit at the feet of a looting expert from the Israel Antiquities Authority. In addition, he phoned an old friend in the London art world who had a number of acquaintances who dabbled in what he liked to call “the naughty end of the trade.” Finally, he quietly renewed contact with General Ferrari, who immediately sent along copies of some of his most closely guarded files, despite the fact that Gabriel pointedly refused to identify his target. It was now an operation, and operational rules applied.