Daniel Silva: The Secret Servant

“Not right away. We tried the traditional route first, a liaison relationship with the AIVD, the Dutch security service. We courted them for months, but the Dutch at that time weren’t interested in dancing with us. After the last rejection, I authorized an attempt to get into the AIVD through the back door. Our local chief of station made a rather clumsy pass at the AIVD deputy in charge of monitoring the Muslim community and it blew up in our faces. You remember the scandal, don’t you, Gabriel?”

He did. The affair had been splashed all over the pages of the Dutch and Israeli newspapers. There had been heated exchanges between the foreign ministries of both countries and angry threats of expulsions.

“When the storm died down, I decided to try again. This time, though, I chose a different target.”

“Rosner,” Gabriel put in, and Shamron nodded his head in agreement.

“He monitored what was being said in the mosques when no one else in Amsterdam was listening, and read the filth running through the sewers of the Internet when everyone else averted their eyes. On more than one occasion, he supplied information to the police that prevented violence. He also happened to be Jewish. As far as the Office was concerned, Rosner was the answer to our prayers.”

“Who handled the recruitment?”

“I did,” Shamron said. “After the AIVD scandal, I wasn’t about to entrust the job to anyone else.”

“And besides,” said Gabriel, “there’s nothing you love better than a good recruitment.”

Shamron responded with a seductive smile, the same smile he had used on a searing afternoon in September 1972, when he had come to see Gabriel at the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem. Gabriel had been a promising young painter; Shamron was a brash operations man who had just been ordered by Prime Minister Golda Meir to hunt down and kill the members of Black September, perpetrators of the Munich Massacre. The operation was code-named Wrath of God, but in reality it was the Wrath of Gabriel. Of the twelve members of Black September killed by the Office, six were dispatched by Gabriel at close range with a.22 caliber Beretta.

“I flew to Amsterdam and took Rosner to dinner in a quiet restaurant overlooking the Amstel. I told stories about the old days-the War of Independence, the Eichmann capture. You know the ones, Gabriel, the stories you and Uzi have heard a thousand times before. At the end of the evening, I laid a contract on the table. He signed without reservation.”

Shamron was interrupted by the sudden scream of the teakettle. Gabriel went into the kitchen and prepared the coffee. When he returned, he placed the French press on the coffee table, along with three mugs and a sugar bowl. Navot gave him a disapproving look. “You’d better put something under that,” he said. “If you leave a ring, Chiara will kill you.”

“I’ll take my chances, Uzi.” Gabriel looked at Shamron. “Who serviced him? You, I suppose.”

“Rosner was my creation,” Shamron said somewhat defensively. “Naturally I was reluctant to turn over the reins to anyone else. I gave him a bit of money to hire an assistant, and when Rosner had something to report I was the one who went to see him.”

“In Amsterdam?”

“Never,” said Shamron. “Usually we met across the border, in Antwerp.”

“And when they ran you out of the Office for the second time?”

“I hung onto a few bits and pieces to keep me occupied in my dotage. Rosner was one of those bits. Another was you , of course. I didn’t trust you with anyone else.” He spooned sugar into his coffee and gave it a melancholy stir. “When I went to work for the prime minister as his senior security adviser, I had to surrender control of Rosner.” He glanced at Navot. “I entrusted him to Uzi. After all, he was our western European katsa. ”

“And your protégé,” Gabriel added.

“It wasn’t exactly heavy lifting,” Navot conceded. “Ari had already done all that. I just had to handle Rosner’s reports. Eighteen months ago, he gave me a nugget of pure gold. According to one of Rosner’s sources inside the Muslim community, an al-Qaeda-affiliated cell operating in west Amsterdam had got their hands on a missile and was planning to shoot down an El Al jetliner on approach at Schiphol Airport. That evening we diverted the flight to Brussels and tipped off the Dutch. They arrested four men sitting in a parked car at the end of the runway. In the trunk was an antiaircraft missile that had been smuggled into Amsterdam from Iraq.”

“How did Rosner know about the plot?”

“He had sources,” said Shamron. “Very good sources. I tried on a number of occasions to convince him to turn them over to us, but he always refused. He said his sources talked to him because he wasn’t a professional. Well, not quite a professional, but no one else in Holland knew that.”

“And you’re sure about that?” asked Gabriel. “You’re certain Rosner didn’t die because of his links to us?”

“Unfortunately, there was no shortage of people in Amsterdam who wanted Solomon dead. Some of the city’s most prominent jihadist imams had been openly calling for a volunteer to step forward. They finally found their man in Muhammad Hamza, a housepainter from north Amsterdam who just happened to be working on a project across the street from Rosner’s home. The Amsterdam police found a videotape inside Hamza’s apartment after his arrest. It was shot the morning of Rosner’s murder. On it Hamza calmly says that today would be the day he killed his Jew.”

“So what type of errand do you want me to run in Amsterdam?”

Navot and Shamron looked at each other, as if trying to get their story straight. Shamron let Navot answer. He was, after all, chief of Special Ops.

“We’d like you to go to Amsterdam and clean out his files. We want the names of all those golden sources, of course, but we also want to make sure there’s nothing there that might link him to us.”

“It would be deeply embarrassing if our ties to Solomon were ever exposed,” Shamron added. “And it would also make it more difficult for us to recruit sayanim from the Jewish communities around the world. We’re a small service. We can’t function without them.”

The sayanim were a worldwide network of volunteer Jewish helpers. They were the bankers who supplied Office agents with cash in emergencies; the doctors who treated them in secret when they were wounded; the hoteliers who gave them rooms under false names, and the rental-car agents who supplied them with untraceable vehicles. The vast majority of the sayanim had been recruited and nurtured by Shamron himself. He devotedly referred to them as the secret fruit of the Diaspora.

“It also has the potential to make a volatile situation in the Netherlands much worse,” Gabriel said. “Solomon Rosner was one of the most well-known critics of militant Islam in Europe. If it ever came out that he was our paid mouthpiece, the Jewish community in Holland might find itself at risk.”

“I disagree with your characterization,” said Shamron, “but your point is duly noted.”

“How am I supposed to get into Rosner’s office?”

It was Navot who answered. “About a year ago, when the threats against Rosner started coming fast and furious, we knew we had to make plans for just such a contingency. Rosner told his assistant, a young woman named Sophie Vanderhaus, that, in the event of his death, she would be contacted by a gentleman named Rudolf Heller and given a set of instructions she was to follow to the letter.”

Herr Rudolf Heller, venture capitalist for Zurich, was one of Shamron’s many false identities.

“I contacted Sophie last night,” Shamron said. “I told her that a colleague of mine would be arriving in Amsterdam tomorrow afternoon and that he was to be given complete access to all of Professor Rosner’s files.”