Daniel Silva - The Fallen Angel

“If you must.”

“I must,” replied Massoud. “What time is it?”

“Isha.”

“Which direction is Mecca?”

Gabriel pointed to the right. Massoud smiled.

“Third rule of interrogation, Allon. Don’t tell the subject where he is.”

“You’re in hell, Massoud. And the only way you’re going to get out is to tell me the truth.”

He prayed for thirty minutes. When he was finished, Mikhail and Yaakov started to secure him to the metal chair, but Gabriel intervened and in Hebrew said the restraints would not be necessary. Massoud furrowed his brow, as though he did not understand, which Gabriel suspected was not the case. He permitted the Iranian to eat the remainder of his dinner. Then, afterward, he gave him a fresh glass of warm tea.

“How beneficent of you,” remarked Massoud.

“I assure you my motives are entirely selfish,” Gabriel responded. “We have a long night ahead of us.”

“Where would you like to start?”

“The beginning.”

“In the beginning,” Massoud recited, “God created the heavens and the earth. Then he created the Jews and ruined the whole thing.”

“Let’s advance the calendar a few years, shall we?”

“How far?”

“David Girard,” answered Gabriel, “aka Daoud Ghandour.”

It was not possible to tell the story of Daoud Ghandour, he said, without first telling the story of Israel’s ill-fated occupation of Lebanon. At first, Gabriel was reluctant to give Massoud a platform to engage in triumphalist breast-beating, but he quickly realized it was a rare opportunity that could not be spurned. And so he sat patiently, his hands folded on the table, as Massoud recounted how the Iranians had skillfully exploited the chaos in Lebanon to create a death trap for hundreds of Israeli soldiers. “You came to Lebanon to destroy the PLO,” he said, taunting Gabriel ever so slightly, “and in its place you left Hezbollah.”

As Massoud continued, he shed the mantle of the aggrieved political hostage and adopted the air of a university professor leading a small seminar. Watching him, Gabriel understood why he had prospered in the cutthroat world of the Revolutionary Guard and VEVAK. In a parallel universe, Massoud might have been a renowned jurist or a statesman from a decent country. Instead, the turbulent history of Islam and the Middle East had conspired to turn him into a facilitator of mass murder. Even so, Gabriel couldn’t help but feel a grudging respect for him. To anesthetize himself, he glanced frequently at the enlarged photographs of Massoud’s handiwork. So did Massoud. He seemed proudest of one in particular—the one that showed smoke rising from the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut. The event, he said, had been a watershed in the history of American involvement in the Middle East. It had shown America to be a paper tiger that would cut and run at the first sight of blood. And it had made a profound impression on a young Lebanese Shiite named Daoud Ghandour.

“Within a few hours of the attack, he went to see the Hezbollah recruiter in his neighborhood in south Beirut. But there was one problem,” Massoud added. “Ghandour had just been accepted at the Sorbonne in Paris. He said he wanted to stay in Lebanon to fight the Jews and the Americans instead. The recruiter had a better idea. He told Ghandour to get his education. And then he called me.”

“So Ghandour was an Iranian asset from the beginning?”

“You’re being far too linear in your thinking, Allon. Remember, we were active at nearly every level of Hezbollah from the beginning. Hezbollah itself was an Iranian asset.”

“Who ran him?”

“Our station in Paris. When he wasn’t studying, he helped us keep tabs on all the Iranian exiles and dissidents who set up shop in France after the fall of the Shah.”

“And when he went to England?”

“London handled him while he finished his doctorate at Oxford. By the time he started working at Sotheby’s, I’d shed my fatigues and was a respectable diplomat.”

“You took control of him?”

Massoud nodded. “But now, he was no longer Daoud Ghandour, a poor boy from southern Lebanon. He was David Girard, an antiquities expert who traveled the world on behalf of a respected international auction house.”

“Your dream come true.”

“Yours, too, I imagine.”

“How did you use him?”

“Carefully. He could go places I couldn’t go and talk to people who couldn’t come within a mile of me.”

“So you used him as a courier?”

“He was my own private Federal Express. If VEVAK wanted a Hezbollah cell in, say, Istanbul to carry out an attack, we could do it at arm’s length through David. He would serve as the conduit for communications with the cell and see to its financial needs. In some cases, he even coordinated the shipment of explosives and other weapons. It was perfect.” Massoud paused. “And then there was the money.”

“From trading in illicit antiquities?”

Massoud nodded. “David came up with the idea while he was working at Sotheby’s. He knew there was a great deal of money to be made by those willing to ignore the law. He also knew that much of the trade was controlled by one man.”

“Carlo Marchese.”

“Friend of the Vatican,” Massoud added contemptuously. “But Carlo’s organization had one flaw. It was very strong in Europe, but it needed product from the Middle East.”

“Product that Hezbollah was able to supply.”

“Not only Hezbollah. Many of the antiquities were pieces from the Persian Empire that had come out of the ground in Iran. Within a short time, the operation was generating several million dollars a month, all of which went directly into Hezbollah’s coffers.”

“Then a curator at the Vatican started asking too many questions.”

“Yes,” Massoud agreed. “And the party was over.”

When Massoud requested a cigarette a second time, Gabriel relented and gave him one of Yaakov’s Marlboros. He smoked it slowly, as though he suspected he would not receive another, and was careful to direct his exhalations away from Gabriel. VEVAK, it seemed, was aware of Gabriel’s aversion to tobacco.

But that was not all it knew about him. It knew, Massoud boasted, that Monsignor Luigi Donati, private secretary to His Holiness Pope Paul VII, had asked Gabriel to investigate the death of Claudia Andreatti. It also knew that Gabriel had discovered the body of a tomb raider named Roberto Falcone. It knew this, Massoud said, because Carlo Marchese had told his business partner David Girard.

“Carlo was aware of your investigation from the very beginning,” Massoud explained. “And he believed correctly that you were a threat to him. When the other members of the network started to get jumpy, he told them not to worry, that he would find an Italian solution to the problem.”

“Killing me?”

Massoud nodded. “But first, he wanted to get a sense of how much you knew about his operation. So he threw a dinner party in your honor. Then he tried to kill you as you were walking home.” He shook his head slowly. “Frankly, we weren’t surprised when the attempt on your life failed. The man Carlo sent to do the job might have been good enough to earn a living in Italy, but not in our world.”

“So you decided to do it yourself.”

“We looked upon the situation as a unique opportunity to cause a scandal for your service at a time it could least afford one. We also regarded it as a chance to exact some revenge over the damage you did to our nuclear program.”

“How did you know we would find Girard?”

“Let’s just say that we had great faith in your ability, though we never imagined you’d have a stolen Greek amphora in your back pocket. That was a masterstroke, Allon.”