Daniel Silva - The English Assassin

“Gabriel Allon! Shamron’s avenging angel. My God, what are you doing here?”

He climbed down the ladder like a man with old pains. As always, he seemed to be wearing all his clothing at once: a blue button-down shirt, a beige rollneck sweater, a cardigan, a floppy herringbone jacket that seemed a size too large. He had shaved carelessly, and wore socks but no shoes.

He held Gabriel’s hands and kissed his cheek. How long had it been? Twenty-five years, thought Gabriel. In the lexicon of the Wrath of God operation, Lavon had been an ayin, a tracker. An archaeologist by training, he had stalked members of Black September, learned their habits, and devised ways of killing them. He had been a brilliant watcher, a chameleon who could blend into any surroundings. The operation took a terrible physical and psychological toll on all of them, but Gabriel remembered that Lavon had suffered the most. Working alone in the field, exposed to his enemies for long periods of time, he had developed a chronic stomach disorder that stripped thirty pounds from his lean frame. When it was over, Lavon took an assistant professorship at Hebrew University and spent his weekends on digs in the West Bank. Soon he heard other voices. Like Gabriel, he was a child of Holocaust survivors. Searching for ancient relics seemed trivial when there was so much still to be unearthed about the immediate past. He settled in Vienna and put his formidable talents to work in another way: tracking down Nazis and their looted treasure.

“So, what brings you to Vienna? Business? Pleasure?”

“Augustus Rolfe.”

“Rolfe? The banker?” Lavon lowered his head and glared at Gabriel over his glasses. “Gabriel, you weren’t the one who-” He made a gun of his right hand.

Gabriel unzipped his jacket, removed the envelope he had taken from Rolfe’s desk, and handed it to Lavon. Carefully he pried open the flap, as if he were handling a fragment of ancient ceramic, and removed the contents. He glanced at the first photograph, then the second, his face revealing nothing. Then he looked up at Gabriel and smiled.

“Well, well, Herr Rolfe takes a lovely photograph. Where did you get these, Gabriel?”

“From the old man’s desk in Zurich.”

He held up the sheaf of documents. “And these?”

“Same place.”

Lavon looked at the photographs again. “Fantastic.”

“What do they mean?”

“I need to pull a few files. I’ll have the girls get you some coffee and something to eat. We’re going to be a while.”

THEY sat across from each other at a rectangular conference table, a stack of files between them. Gabriel wondered about the people who had come before him: old men convinced the man in the flat next door was one of their tormentors at Buchenwald; children trying to pry open a numbered account in Switzerland where their father had hidden his life savings before being shipped east into the archipelago of death. Lavon picked up one of the photographs-Rolfe seated in a restaurant next to the man with dueling scars on his cheeks-and held it up for Gabriel to see.

“Do you recognize this man?”

“No.”

“His name is Walter Schellenberg, Brigadeführer SS.” Lavon took the top file from the stack and spread it on the table before him. “Walter Schellenberg was the head of Department Four of the Reich Security Main Office. Department Four handled foreign intelligence, which effectively made Schellenberg the international spymaster of the Nazi Party. He was involved in some of the most dramatic intelligence episodes of the war: the Venlo Incident, the attempt to kidnap the Duke of Windsor, and the Cicero operation. At Nuremberg he was convicted of being a member of the SS, but he received a light sentence of just six years in prison.”

“Six years? Why?”

“Because during the last months of the war he arranged for the release of a few Jews from the death camps.”

“How did he manage that?”

“He sold them.”

“So why was the spymaster of the Nazi Party having dinner with Augustus Rolfe?”

“Intelligence services the world over have one thing in common: They all run on money. Even Shamron couldn’t survive without money. But when Shamron needs money, he just lays a hand on the shoulder of a rich friend and tells him the story of how he captured Eichmann. Schellenberg had a special problem. His money was no good anywhere outside Germany. He needed a banker in a neutral country who could provide him with hard currency and then transfer that money through a dummy company or some other front to his agents. Schellenberg needed a man like Augustus Rolfe.”

Lavon picked up the documents Gabriel had taken from Rolfe’s desk. “Take this transaction. Fifteen hundred pounds sterling, wired from the accounts of Pillar Enterprises Limited to the account of a Mr. Ivan Edberg, Enskilde Bank, Stockholm, the twenty-third of October, 1943.”

Gabriel inspected the document, then slid it back across the table.

“ Sweden was neutral, of course, and a hotbed of wartime intelligence,” Lavon said. “Schellenberg surely had an agent there, if not an entire network. I suspect Mr. Edberg was one of those agents. Perhaps the leader and paymaster of the network.”

Lavon slipped the transfer order back into the pile and removed another. He peered down at it through his reading glasses, squinting from the smoke of the cigarette between his lips.

“Another transfer order: one thousand pounds sterling from the account of Pillar Enterprises Limited to a Mr. Jose Suarez, care of the Bank of Lisbon.” Lavon lowered the paper and looked up at Gabriel. “ Portugal, like Sweden, was neutral, and Lisbon was an amusement park for spies. Schellenberg operated there himself during the Duke of Windsor affair.”

“So Rolfe was Schellenberg’s secret banker. But how does that explain the photograph of Rolfe at Berchtesgaden with Himmler and Hitler?”

Lavon prepared his next cup of coffee with the reverence of a true Viennese: a precise measure of heavy cream, just enough sugar to remove the bitter edge. Gabriel thought of Lavon in a safe flat in Paris, living on mineral water and weak tea because his ravaged stomach would tolerate nothing else.

“Everything changed inside Germany after Stalingrad. Even the true believers knew it was over. The Russians were coming from the east, the invasion from the west was inevitable. Anyone who’d accumulated wealth as a result of the war wanted desperately to hang onto that wealth. And where do you think they turned?”

“The bankers of Switzerland.”

“And Augustus Rolfe would have been in a unique position to capitalize on the changing tide of the war. Based on these documents, it appears as though he was an important agent of Walter Schellenberg. I suspect the Nazi bigwigs would have held Herr Rolfe in very high esteem.”

“Someone who could be trusted to look after their money?”

“Their money. Their stolen treasures. All of it.”

“What about the list of names and the account numbers?”

“I think it’s safe to assume that those are German clients. I’ll run them through our database and see if they correspond with known members of the SS and the Nazi Party, but I suspect they’re pseudonyms.”

“Would there be any other record of the accounts in the bank’s files?”

Lavon shook his head. “Typically, the real identities of holders of numbered accounts are known by only the top officers of a bank. The more notorious the customer, the fewer people who know the name attached to the account number. If these accounts belonged to Nazis, I doubt whether anyone knew about them but Rolfe.”

“If he kept the list after all these years, does it mean the accounts still exist?”

“I suppose it’s possible. It depends a great deal on who owned them. If the holder was able to get out of Germany at the end of the war, then I would doubt the account is still active. But if the holder was arrested by the Allies-”