Daniel Silva - The Fallen Angel

“What am I looking at?” asked Ari Shamron.

“The prelude,” replied Uzi Navot.

“When does the curtain rise on the first act?”

“A minute, maybe less.”

Shamron severed the connection and gazed out at the blue lights flashing across the city. It was a beautiful sight, he thought. By way of deception, thou shalt do war.

At that same moment, some three miles to the west of Shamron’s unique observation post, Yossi Gavish and Mikhail Abramov sat astride a pair of motorcycles at the edge of a small park on the Hagenstrasse. At that hour, the park was long deserted, but warm lights burned in the bottle-glass windows of the miniature Teutonic castles lining the street. Mikhail was rubbing his sore knee. Yossi was so motionless he looked as though he had been cast in bronze.

“Relax, Yossi,” Mikhail said softly. “You have to relax.”

“You’re not the one with a bomb in your pocket.”

“It’s not going to explode until ten seconds after you attach it to the car.”

“What if it malfunctions?”

“They never do.”

“There’s always a first time.”

A green-and-white police van flashed past, siren screaming. Yossi had yet to move a muscle.

“Breathe,” Mikhail ordered. “Otherwise, the police are liable to think you’re about to kidnap an Iranian diplomat.”

“I don’t know why I have to attach the bomb.”

“Someone has to do it.”

“I’m an analyst,” Yossi said. “I don’t blow up cars. I read books.”

“Would you rather take out the driver instead?”

“And how am I supposed to do that? Dazzle him with my wit and intellect?”

Before Mikhail could respond, he heard a crackle in his miniature earpiece, followed by three short bursts of tone. Looking up the street, he saw the headlights of an approaching Mercedes. As it swept past their position, he could see Massoud in the backseat, catching up on a bit of paperwork by the glow of his executive reading lamp. A few seconds later came a BMW, Rimona driving, Yaakov and Oded seated ramrod straight in back. Finally, Eli Lavon rattled past in a Passat station wagon, clutching the wheel as though he were piloting an oil tanker through icy seas. Mikhail and Yossi eased into the trailing position and waited for the next signal.

They had come to the point that Shamron liked to describe as the operational fork in the road. Until now, no line had been crossed and no crime committed, save for a minor bomb scare in the Europa Center. The team could still abort, regroup, reassess, and try another night. In many respects, it was the easier decision to make—the decision to sheathe the sword rather than swing it. Shamron called it “the coward’s escape hatch.” But then, Shamron had always believed that far more operations had been sunk by hesitation than by recklessness.

On that night, however, the decision was not Shamron’s to make. Instead, it was in the hands of a battered secret warrior sitting alone in an empty house in Wannsee. He was staring at the screen of his computer, watching his team and his target as they approached the point of no return. It was the Königsallee, a street running from the parkland of the Grunewald to the busy Kurfürstendamm—and once Massoud crossed it, he would be beyond their reach. Gabriel keyed into his secure radio and asked whether anyone had any last-minute objections. Hearing nothing, he gave the order to proceed. Then he closed his eyes and listened to the sirens.

Afterward, there were some at King Saul Boulevard who would bemoan the fact that no videotape had been made. Shamron, however, took the opposite view. He believed that operational videotapes, like suicide missions, should be left to Israel’s enemies. Besides, he said, no piece of video could capture the perfection of the maneuver. It was a piece of epic poetry, a fable to be told to successive generations by the glow of a desert campfire.

It began with an almost imperceptible movement of two vehicles—one driven by Rimona, the other by Eli Lavon. Simultaneously, both slowed and moved slightly to the right, leaving Yossi a clear pathway to the rear bumper of the Mercedes. He took it with a twist of his throttle and within a few seconds was staring over the devil’s left shoulder. Carefully, he reached into his coat pocket and flipped the activation toggle on the magnetic grenade. Then he stared straight ahead and waited for the girl to step into the street.

She was wearing a neon-green jacket with reflective stripes on the sleeves and pushing a bicycle with a lamp aglow on the handlebars. An hour earlier, she had been carrying the canvas rucksack that had caused so much distress in central Berlin. Now, as she entered a well-lit pedestrian crosswalk, limping slightly, she carried nothing but a false passport and a boundless hatred for the man riding in the backseat of the approaching Mercedes sedan.

For an instant, they all feared that Massoud’s driver intended to use his diplomatic immunity to run her down. But finally, he slammed on the brakes, and the big black car came skidding to a halt amid a cloud of blue-gray smoke. Yossi swerved to his left to avoid the car’s rear bumper and then shouted a few obscenities through the driver’s-side window before covertly attaching the grenade inside the front wheel well. By now, the girl had safely reached the other side of the street. Massoud’s driver actually gave her a small wave of apology as he drove off. The girl accepted it with a smile, all the while moving away with what seemed to be inordinate haste.

Six seconds later, the device exploded. Its carefully shaped and calibrated charge sent the entire force of the detonation inward, leaving no chance of collateral damage or casualties. Its bark was definitely worse than its bite, though the blast was powerful enough to shred the car’s left-front tire and blow open its hood. Now blinded and confused, the driver lurched the car instinctively to the right. It bounded over the curb and smashed through an iron fence before beaching itself in the Hagenplatz, a small triangle of green that the team affectionately referred to as Ice Cream Square.

If the plan had a weakness, it was the bus shelter located a few feet away from the intersection. On that evening, five people waited there—an elderly German couple, two young men of Turkish descent, and a woman in her twenties who was so thin and pale she might have just stumbled from a building that had been bombed by the Allies. What they saw next appeared to be nothing more than an act of kindness carried out by three good Samaritans who just happened upon the scene. One of the men, a tall, slender motorcyclist, immediately rushed to the aid of the stricken driver—or so it seemed to the witnesses in the bus shelter. They did not notice, however, that the motorcyclist quickly removed a pistol from the driver’s shoulder holster. Nor did they notice that he injected a dose of powerful sedative into the driver’s left thigh.

The other good Samaritans focused their attention on the man riding in the backseat of the Mercedes. Owing to the fact that he was not wearing a seat belt, he was left heavily dazed by the force of the collision. An injection of sedative worsened his condition, though the witnesses did not see that, either. What they would remember was the sight of the two men lifting the injured passenger from his ruined car and placing him tenderly in their own. Instantly, the car shot forward and turned left toward the wilds of the Grunewald—odd, since the nearest hospital was to the right. The motorcyclist followed, as did a Passat station wagon driven by a meek-looking soul who appeared oblivious to the entire episode. Later, when questioned by police, the witnesses would realize that the operation had been carried out in near silence. In fact, only one of the good Samaritans, a man with dark hair and pockmarks on his cheeks, had spoken to the injured passenger. “Come with us,” he had told him. “We will protect you from the Jews.”