Daniel Silva - The Fallen Angel

As Gabriel predicted, the snatch had taken less time than expected—just thirteen seconds from beginning to end, with the extraction of Massoud from the car requiring only eight. Now, alone in the Wannsee safe house, he listened as the team made the first vehicle change of the night and then watched the lights of their beacons streaking northward along the E51 Autobahn. Time was now a precious commodity. They needed every drop, every granule, they could find. A few seconds here and there could mean the difference between success and failure, between life and death. Gabriel could do nothing more. He had already set the city of his nightmares alight. Now all he could do was watch it burn.

He sent a flash message to King Saul Boulevard confirming the first phase of the operation had gone as planned. Then he stepped outside and climbed into an Audi sedan. After driving past the haunted lakeside villa where the murder of his grandparents had been planned, he headed for the Autobahn. The Berlin police were still streaming toward the Europa Center. But for how long?

On the top floor of the Hotel Adlon, Ari Shamron stood alone in his window, watching the blue police lights swirling beneath his feet. For the past several minutes, all had been streaking toward the same point in western Berlin. But at 8:36 p.m., he noticed a distinct change in the pattern. He didn’t bother to ask King Saul Boulevard for an explanation. The deception was over. Now it was a race for the border.

THE IRANIAN LIBERATION ARMY, a previously unknown group dedicated to the overthrow of the country’s theocratic rulers, appeared for the first time on Western radar screens—or anywhere else, for that matter—late the following morning, when it claimed responsibility for the abduction of Massoud Rahimi, a senior Iranian intelligence agent based in the German capital of Berlin. It did so in a printed manifesto delivered clandestinely to the BBC in London, and on a Web site that popped up within hours of the abduction. Among its laundry list of demands were a cessation of Iran’s nuclear weapons program and the release of all those jailed for reasons of politics, religion, conscience, or sexuality. The mullahs had just seventy-two hours to comply; otherwise, the group vowed, it would grant Massoud the violent death he had given to so many innocent victims. As if to illustrate its seriousness, it posted a photo of the captive flanked by two men wearing balaclava helmets. Massoud was staring straight into the camera with his hands bound behind his back. His heavy face showed no signs of violence, though his eyes appeared somewhat groggy.

The dramatic emergence of a new Iranian opposition movement caught many in the media by surprise, and during the first hours of the crisis, reporters in Europe and America were left with no choice but to speculate wildly as to the ILA’s origins and aims. Gradually, however, a portrait emerged of a small, tightly knit group of secular Iranian intellectuals and exiles who wished to drag their country from the Dark Ages into the modern world. By that evening, terrorism experts and foreign policy analysts on both sides of the Atlantic were talking about a new force that posed a clear threat to the Iranian regime’s grip on power. And not one realized that every shred of information they were imparting with such authority had been invented by a group of people working out of a basement office in Tel Aviv.

A few of the better terrorism experts were familiar with the name Massoud Rahimi, while those old enough to recall the Iranian hostage crisis took a small measure of joy in his predicament. That was not the case, however, in Tehran, where the Iranians reacted with predictable fury. In an official statement, they denied the existence of a group called the Iranian Liberation Army, denied that Massoud Rahimi was an agent of Iranian intelligence, and denied he was in any way linked to terrorism. Furthermore, they accused Israel of creating the group out of whole cloth in order to cover up its involvement in the affair. The Israeli prime minister took to the floor of the Knesset to denounce the Iranian claims as the ravings of depraved zealots. Then he took a not-so-subtle poke at the Germans for allowing Massoud, a known murderer with the blood of hundreds of innocent people on his hands, to masquerade as a diplomatic functionary on German soil. The German chancellor called the remarks “unhelpful” and pleaded with the prime minister to take steps to lower the temperature. Privately, she told her intelligence chiefs that she believed the Israelis were almost certainly involved.

Not surprisingly, given the sophistication of the operation, there were many within the German police and security services who agreed with their chancellor, though they had no evidence to support such an allegation. A frustrated interior minister fumed to his closest aides that it had to be the Israelis because no other intelligence service in the world was clever enough—or, frankly, devious enough—to even conceive of such an operation. Wisely, the minister’s aides counseled their master to leave such sentiments out of his next press briefing.

To their credit, the German police threw everything they had into the search for the missing Iranian. They scoured the country from east to west, from the mountains of Bavaria to the rocky gray shores of the Baltic. They looked for him in cities and in towns large and small. They made contact with their sources and informants inside Germany’s large community of radical Islamists and tapped every phone and e-mail account they thought might yield a clue. After twenty-four hours, however, they had nothing to show for their efforts. That evening, the interior minister informed the Iranian ambassador that, as far as the German police were concerned, his colleague had vanished from the face of the earth. It was not true, of course. They were simply looking for him in the wrong place.

At the northern tip of Denmark is a narrow cat’s claw of a peninsula where the North Sea and the Baltic collide in a war without end. On the Baltic side of the peninsula, the sand is flat and desolate, but along the North Sea it rises into windswept dunes. Here lies the tiny hamlet of Kandestederne. In summer, it is filled with Danish holidaymakers, but for the rest of the year it feels as though it has been abandoned to the plague.

At the fringes of the village, hidden in the swale of a large dune, stood a handsome wooden cottage with a large porch facing the sea. It had four bedrooms, an airy kitchen filled with stainless steel appliances, and two open sitting rooms furnished in the minimalist Danish style. It also boasted a wine cellar in the basement, which Housekeeping had quietly converted into a soundproof holding cell. Inside sat the man for whom the German police were so desperately searching—blindfolded, gagged, stripped to his underwear, and shivering violently with cold. In twenty-four hours, he had been given nothing to eat or drink and no care other than a small dose of tranquilizer to keep him quiet. No one had spoken to him. Indeed, as far as Massoud knew at that moment, he had been left alone to die a slow, agonizing death of starvation. It was a punishment he deserved. Providence, however, had chosen another path for him.

The next leg of Massoud’s journey began in the twenty-sixth hour of his captivity, when Mikhail and Yaakov escorted him blindfolded upstairs to the dining room. After securing him tightly to a metal chair, they removed the blindfold and gag. Massoud blinked rapidly several times before surveying the walls. They were hung with several enlarged photographs of his handiwork—here the ruins of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, here the charred hull of a Tel Aviv bus, here the shattered remnants of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. He managed to contort his heavy features into an expression of disbelief, but when his gaze finally settled on the man seated directly across the table, he recoiled in fear.