The Fallen Angel (20 page)

PART THREE

THE WELL OF SOULS

31

BERLIN–NORTHERN DENMARK

T
HE
I
RANIAN
L
IBERATION
A
RMY
, 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.

“You were expecting someone else?” asked Gabriel calmly in English.

“I have no idea who you are,” Massoud responded in the same language.

“Bullshit.”

“You won't get away with this.”

“We already have.”

Three items lay on the table in front of Gabriel: a manila file folder, a BlackBerry, and a loaded Beretta 9mm. He moved the Beretta a few inches with studied care and then pushed the BlackBerry across the table so Massoud could see the screen. On it was the front page of the BBC's mobile news site. The lead story was about a bold kidnapping in the heart of Berlin.

“You have committed a gross violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations,” Massoud said after a moment.

“Your abduction was carried out by the Iranian Liberation Army. It says so right there on the BBC,” Gabriel added, tapping the screen. “And as you know, the BBC is never wrong.”

“Well played,” said Massoud.

“It wasn't that hard,” replied Gabriel. “We just borrowed a page from your playbook.”

“Which one?”

“Taqiyya
.
”

“There's no such thing as
taqiyya
. It is nothing but a slur spread by the enemies of Shia Islam.”

“You engage in
taqiyya
every day when you assure the world that your nuclear program is strictly for peaceful purposes.”

“Is that what this is about?”

“No.” Gabriel retrieved the BlackBerry and then flipped slowly through the contents of the manila file folder. “You stand accused of masterminding multiple acts of terrorism that have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of innocent people. You also stand accused of conspiring to commit future acts of terrorism and of providing material support to a group that has as its goal the physical annihilation of my people.” He looked up from the file and asked, “How do you plead?”

“I am a third secretary in the consular section of the Iranian Embassy in Berlin.”

“How do you plead?” Gabriel asked again.

“You are in violation of all diplomatic norms and customs.”

“How do you plead?”

Massoud raised his chin and said, “I plead not guilty.”

Gabriel closed the file folder. Court adjourned.

 

They brought him back for two more hearings that night, each with the same result. After that, they kept him awake with regular bastings of freezing seawater and recordings of ear-shattering noise that were piped into the soundproof chamber for Massoud's private listening enjoyment. Gabriel was reluctant to employ physical coercion—he knew that with enough sleep and sensory deprivation, Massoud would admit to being the Cat in the Hat—but he had no choice. Two clocks were now ticking. On one was the time they had left before the attack; on the other, the time they had left before they were discovered. Gabriel had set a deadline of seventy-two hours to be out of Denmark. The chief of the Danish security service was a friend, but he wouldn't be for long if he found out Gabriel had brought a man like Massoud Rahimi onto Danish soil.

And so, as that second day dragged on, they gradually turned up the pressure on their prize. The noise grew louder, the water colder, and the threats whispered into his ear became ever more terrifying. When he asked for food, they offered him a bowl of sand. And when he pleaded for drink, they drenched him with a bucket of briny water straight from the sea. Sleep was out of the question, they assured him, unless he agreed to cooperate.

Slowly, with each passing hour, Massoud's strength ebbed, as did his will to resist. More than anything, though, he seemed to realize that this unfortunate episode did not necessarily have to end with his death, that perhaps there was a deal to be made. But how to convince him to accept the outstretched hand? And who to extend it in the first place?

“Why me?” asked Eli Lavon incredulously.

“Because you're the least threatening person in this house,” Gabriel said. “And because you haven't laid a finger on him.”

“I don't interrogate people. I just follow them.”

“You don't have to ask him anything, Eli. Just let him know that I'm willing to discuss a generous plea bargain.”

Lavon spent five minutes alone with the monster and then came back upstairs.

“How did it go?”

“Other than the part about threatening to kill me, I thought it went as well as could be expected.”

“How long should we give him?”

“An hour should be enough.”

They gave him two instead.

 

The next time Massoud was escorted into the makeshift courtroom, he was shivering uncontrollably, and his lips were blue with cold. Gabriel seemed not to notice. He had eyes only for the file that was open before him on the table.

“It has come to our attention that during your time in Berlin, you have been less than forthright in your use of VEVAK operational funds,” Gabriel said. “Obviously, this is of no concern to us. But as fellow tradesmen, we feel duty bound to report it to your superiors in Tehran. When we do, I'm afraid they'll want to secure your release for reasons other than your personal well-being.”

“More Jewish lies,” Massoud responded.

Gabriel smiled and then proceeded to recite a series of account numbers and corresponding values.

“Those are all legitimate accounts used for legitimate purposes,” Massoud replied calmly.

“So you have no objection to us telling your superiors at VEVAK about them?”

“I don't work for VEVAK.”

“Yes, you do, Massoud. And that means you have a way out of your current circumstances.” Gabriel paused, then added, “If I were in your position, I'd take it.”

“Perhaps I'm not as talkative as you, Allon.”

“Ah,” said Gabriel, smiling, “so you recognize me after all.”

“You do have a way of getting your face into the newspaper.”

Gabriel turned a page in his file. “You face serious charges, Massoud. How do you plead?”

“Not guilty.”

“How do you plead?”

“Not guilty.”

“How do you plead?”

Silence . . .

Gabriel looked up from the file.

“How do you plead, Massoud?” he asked gently.

“What do you want from me?”

“I want you to answer a few questions.”

“Then what?”

“If you tell me the truth, you'll be released. If you lie to me, I'll tell your superiors in Tehran that you've been stealing money from them. And then they'll put a bullet in your head.”

“Why should I trust you?”

“Because at this moment, I'm your only friend in the world.”