ASHTARA, AZERBAIJAN
SARAH BANCROFT’S CALL TO GABRIEL ALLON went unanswered that evening, for as was often the case he was in the field. Due to the sensitive nature of his mission, only the prime minister and a handful of his most trusted senior officers knew his whereabouts—a moderate-size villa with ocher-colored walls, hard along the shore of the Caspian Sea. Behind the villa, rectangular plots of farmland stretched toward the foothills of the eastern Caucasus Mountains. Atop one of the hills stood a small mosque. Five times each day the crackling loudspeaker in the minaret summoned the faithful to prayer. His long quarrel with the forces of radical Islam notwithstanding, Gabriel found the sound of the muezzin’s voice comforting. At that moment in time, he had no better friend in the world than the Muslim citizens of Azerbaijan.
The nominal owner of the villa was a Baku-based real estate holding company. Its true owner, however, was Housekeeping, the division of the Israeli intelligence service that procured and managed safe properties. The arrangement had been covertly blessed by the chief of the Azerbaijani security service, with whom Gabriel had cultivated an unusually close relationship. Azerbaijan’s neighbor to the south was the Islamic Republic of Iran. Indeed, the Iranian border was only five kilometers from the villa, which explained why Gabriel had not set foot beyond its walls since his arrival. Had the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps known of his presence, it would have doubtless mounted an attempt to assassinate or abduct him. Gabriel did not begrudge their loathing of him. Such were the rules of the game in a rough neighborhood. Besides, if presented with the chance to kill the head of the Revolutionary Guard, he would have gladly pulled the trigger himself.
The villa by the sea was not the only logistical asset Gabriel had at his disposal in Azerbaijan. His service—those who worked there referred to it as “the Office” and nothing else—also maintained a small fleet of fishing boats, cargo ships, and fast motor launches, all with proper Azerbaijani registry. The vessels shuttled regularly between Azerbaijani harbors and the Iranian coastline, where they inserted Office agents and operational teams and collected valuable Iranian assets willing to do Israel’s bidding.
A year earlier, one of those assets, a man who worked deep inside Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program, had been brought by boat to the Office’s villa in Ashtara. There he had told Gabriel about a warehouse in a drab commercial district of Tehran. The warehouse contained thirty-two safes of Iranian manufacture. Inside were hundreds of computer disks and millions of pages of documents. The source claimed the material proved conclusively what Iran had long denied, that it had worked methodically and tirelessly to construct an implosion nuclear device and attach it to a delivery system capable of reaching Israel and beyond.
For the better part of the last year, the Office had been watching the warehouse with human surveillance artists and miniature cameras. They had learned that the first shift of security guards arrived each morning at seven. They had also learned that for several hours each night, beginning around ten o’clock, the warehouse was protected only by the locks on its doors and the surrounding fence. Gabriel and Yaakov Rossman, the chief of special operations, had agreed that the team would remain inside no later than five a.m. The source had told them which safes to open and which to ignore. Owing to the method of entry—torches that burned at 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit—there was no way to conceal the operation. Therefore, Gabriel had ordered the team not to copy the relevant material but to steal it outright. Copies were easily denied. Originals were harder to explain. Furthermore, the brazenness of seizing Iran’s nuclear archives and smuggling them out of the country would humiliate the regime in front of its restive populace. Gabriel loved nothing more than embarrassing the Iranians.
But stealing the original documents increased the risk of the operation exponentially. Encrypted copies could be carried out of the country on a couple of high-capacity flash drives. The originals would be much harder to move and conceal. An Iranian asset of the Office had purchased a Volvo cargo truck. If the security guards at the warehouse kept to their normal schedule, the team would have a two-hour head start. Their route would take them from the fringes of Tehran, over the Alborz Mountains, and down to the shore of the Caspian. The exfiltration point was a beach near the town of Babolsar. The backup was a few miles to the east at Khazar Abad. All sixteen members of the team planned to leave together. Most were Farsi-speaking Iranian Jews who could easily pass as native Persians. The team leader, however, was Mikhail Abramov, a Moscow-born officer who had carried out numerous dangerous assignments for the Office, including the assassination of a top Iranian nuclear scientist in the center of Tehran. Mikhail was the operation’s sore thumb. In Gabriel’s experience, every operation needed at least one.
Once upon a time, Gabriel Allon would have undoubtedly been a part of such a team. Born in the Valley of Jezreel, the fertile plot of land that had produced many of Israel’s finest warriors and spies, he was studying painting at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem in September 1972 when a man named Ari Shamron came to see him. A few days earlier a terrorist group called Black September, a front for the Palestine Liberation Organization, had murdered eleven Israeli athletes and coaches at the Olympic Games in Munich. Prime Minister Golda Meir had ordered Shamron and the Office to “send forth the boys” to hunt down and assassinate the men responsible. Shamron wanted Gabriel, a fluent speaker of Berlin-accented German who could pose convincingly as an artist, to be his instrument of vengeance. Gabriel, with the defiance of youth, had told Shamron to find someone else. And Shamron, not for the last time, had bent Gabriel to his will.
The operation was code-named Wrath of God. For three years Gabriel and a small team of operatives stalked their prey across Western Europe and the Middle East, killing at night and in broad daylight, living in fear that at any moment they might be arrested by local authorities and charged as murderers. In all, twelve members of Black September died at their hands. Gabriel personally killed six of the terrorists with a .22-caliber Beretta pistol. Whenever possible, he shot his victims eleven times, one bullet for each murdered Jew. When finally he returned to Israel, his temples were gray from stress and exhaustion. Shamron called them smudges of ash on the prince of fire.
It had been Gabriel’s intention to resume his career as an artist, but each time he stood before a canvas, he saw only the faces of the men he had killed. And so he traveled to Venice as an expatriate Italian named Mario Delvecchio to study the craft of restoration. When his apprenticeship was complete, he returned to the Office, and to the waiting arms of Ari Shamron. Posing as a gifted if taciturn European-based art restorer, he eliminated some of Israel’s most dangerous enemies and carried off some of the most celebrated operations in Office history. Tonight’s would rank among his finest. But only if it succeeded. And if it failed? Sixteen highly trained Office agents would be arrested, tortured, and in all likelihood publicly executed. Gabriel would have no choice but to resign, an ignoble end to a career against which all others would be measured. It was even possible he might take down the prime minister with him.
For now, there was nothing Gabriel could do but wait and worry himself half to death. The team had entered the Islamic Republic the previous evening and made their way to a network of safe houses in Tehran. At 10:15 p.m. Tehran time, Gabriel received a message from the Operations Desk at King Saul Boulevard over the secure link, informing him that the last shift of security guards had left the warehouse. Gabriel ordered the team to enter, and at 10:31 p.m. they were in. That left them six hours and twenty-nine minutes to torch their way into the targeted safes and seize the nuclear archives. It was a minute less than Gabriel had hoped they would have, a small setback. In his experience, every second counted.
Gabriel was blessed with a natural patience, a trait that had served him well as both a restorer and an intelligence operative. But that night on the shore of the Caspian Sea, all forbearance abandoned him. He paced the half-furnished rooms of the villa, he muttered to himself, he ranted nonsense at his two long-suffering bodyguards. Mainly, he thought about all the reasons why sixteen of his finest officers would never make it out of Iran alive. He was certain of only one thing: if confronted by Iranian forces, the team would not surrender quietly. Gabriel had granted Mikhail, a former
