4
AMSTERDAM
Name, please?” asked the front-desk clerk at the Hotel Europa.
“Kiever,” Gabriel replied in German-accented English. “Heinrich Kiever.”
“Ah, yes, here it is. Your room is ready.” There was genuine surprise in her voice. “You have a message, Herr Kiever.”
Gabriel, playing the role of the travel-weary businessman, accepted the small slip of paper with a frown. It stated that his colleague from Heller Enterprises in Zurich had already checked into the hotel and was awaiting his call. Gabriel squeezed the message into a ball and shoved it into the pocket of his overcoat. It was cashmere. The girls in Identity had spared no expense on his wardrobe.
“Your room is on the sixth floor. It’s one of our premier suites.” She handed him an electronic card key and recited a long list of luxurious hotel amenities Gabriel had no intention of using. “Do you require assistance with your bag?”
Gabriel glanced at the bellman, an emaciated youth who looked like he had spent his lunch hour in one of Amsterdam’s notorious brown cafés. “I think I can manage, thank you.”
He boarded a waiting elevator and rode it up to the sixth floor. The door to Suite 612 was located at the end of a corridor, in a small, private alcove. Gabriel ran his fingertips around the jamb, searching for any sign of a foreign object such as a fragment of loose wiring, and held his breath as he inserted the card key into the electronic lock. There was little “premier” about the room he entered, though the view of the canal houses along the Amstel River was one of the finest in the city. A bottle of mediocre champagne was sweating in an ice bucket on the coffee table. The handwritten note said: Welcome back to the Europa, Herr Kiever. Strange, because, to the best of Gabriel’s recollection, Herr Kiever had never stayed there before.
He removed a Nokia mobile phone from his coat pocket. It was indeed a telephone, but it contained several features unavailable on ordinary commercial models, such as a device capable of detecting the signals and electrical impulses of concealed transmitters. He held the phone in front of his face and spent the next five minutes padding slowly round the rooms of the suite, watching the power meter for subtle fluctuations. Satisfied the room had not been bugged, he conducted a second search, this one for evidence of a bomb or any other lethal device. Only then did he pick up the phone on the bedside table and dial Room 611. “I’m here,” he said in German, and immediately set down the receiver.
A moment later there was a gentle knock at the door. The man who entered was several years older than Gabriel, small and bookish, with wispy, unkempt gray hair and quick brown eyes. As usual he seemed to be wearing all his clothing at once: a button-down shirt with ascot, a cardigan sweater, a rumpled tweed jacket. “Lovely accommodations,” said Eli Lavon. “Better than that pensione where we stayed in Rome the night before the Zwaiter hit in seventy-two. Do you remember it, Gabriel? My God, what a dump.”
“We were posing as university students,” Gabriel reminded him. “We can’t pose as students anymore. I suppose that’s one of the few fringe benefits of growing old.”
Lavon gave Gabriel an elusive smile and lowered himself wearily into an armchair. Even Gabriel, who had known Lavon more than thirty years, sometimes found it hard to imagine that this fussy hypochondriacal little man was without question the finest street surveillance artist the Office had ever produced. They had worked together for the first time during the Wrath of God operation. Lavon, an archaeologist by training, had been an ayin, a tracker. When the unit disbanded, he had settled in Vienna and opened a small investigative bureau called Wartime Claims and Inquiries. Operating on a shoestring budget, he had managed to track down millions of dollars in looted Jewish assets and had played a significant role in prying a multibillion-dollar settlement from the banks of Switzerland. He had recently returned to Israel and was teaching biblical archaeology at Hebrew University. In his spare time he lectured on the fine art of physical surveillance at the Academy. No Office recruit ever made it into the field without first spending a few days with the great Eli Lavon.
“Your disguise is quite effective,” Lavon said with professional admiration. “For an instant even I didn’t recognize you.”
Gabriel looked at his reflection in the mirror over the dressing table. He wore a pair of black-framed eyeglasses, contact lenses that turned his green eyes to brown, and a false goatee that accentuated his already-narrow features.
“I would have added a bit more gray to your hair,” Lavon said.
“I have enough already,” Gabriel said. “How did you get roped into this affair?”
“Proximity, I suppose. I was at a conference in Prague delivering a lecture on our dig at Tel Megiddo. As I came off the stage my mobile phone was ringing. You’ll never guess who it was.”
“Trust me, Eli—I can guess.”
“I hear that voice, the voice of God with a murderous Polish accent, telling me to leave Prague for Amsterdam at once.” Lavon shook his head slowly. “Does Shamron really have nothing better to do at his age than worry about a dead sayan? He’s lucky to be alive. He should be enjoying his last few years on this earth, but instead he clings to the Office like a drowning man grasping at a life ring.”
“Rosner was his sayan,” Gabriel said. “And I’m sure he feels partly responsible for his death.”
“He could have let Uzi handle it. But he doesn’t fully trust Uzi, does he, Gabriel? The old man wanted you in Special Ops, not Uzi, and he’s never going to rest until you’re running the place.” Lavon pushed up the sleeve of his tweed jacket and looked at his watch. “Sophie Vanderhaus awaits us. Have you given much thought to how you’re going to play it with her?”
“She’s an intelligent woman. I suspect she already has a good idea about Herr Heller’s true affiliation—and why Rosner always met with him outside the country.”
Lavon frowned. “I must confess I’m not really looking forward to this. I suppose there’s a ritual to these things. When agents die, their secrets have to go with them to the grave. It’s like tahara, the washing of the dead. Next time it could be one of us.”
“Promise me something, Eli.”
“Anything.”
“Promise me that if anything happens to me, you’ll be the one who buries all my secrets.”
“It would be my honor.” Lavon patted the pocket of his jacket. “Oh, I nearly forgot this. A bodel gave this to me at the airport this morning after I arrived.”
The bodelim were Office couriers. The item Lavon had been given was a Beretta 9mm pistol. Gabriel took it from his grasp and slipped it into the waistband of his trousers at the small of his back.
“You’re not really going to bring that, are you?”
“I have enemies, Eli—lots of enemies.”
“Obviously, so did Solomon Rosner.”
“And one of them might still be hanging around his house.”
“Just try not to kill anyone while we’re in Amsterdam, Gabriel. Dead bodies have a way of spoiling an otherwise uneventful trip.”