A Death in Vienna

into the trees, he paused briefly to look over his shoulder and saw Radek, clinging to the arm of Oded, rising slowly to his feet.
    PART FOUR
    THE PRISONER OF ABU KABIR
    39
    JAFFA, ISRAEL
    THERE WAS CONSIDERABLEdebate over where to put him. Lev thought him a security risk and wanted him kept permanently under Office care. Shamron, as usual, took the opposite position, if for no other reason than he did not want his beloved service in the business of running jails. The prime minister, only half-jokingly, suggested that Radek be force-marched into the Negev to be picked over by the scorpions and the vultures. It was Gabriel, eventually, who carried the day. The worst punishment for a man like Radek, Gabriel argued, was to be treated like a common criminal. They searched for a suitable place to lock him away and settled on a police detention facility, originally built by the British during the Mandate, in a seedy quarter of Jaffa still known by its Arab name, Abu Kabir.
    A period of seventy-two hours passed before Radek’s capture was made public. The prime minister’s communiqué was terse and deliberately misleading. Great care was taken to avoid needlessly embarrassing the Austrians. Radek, the prime minister said, was discovered living under a false identity in an unspecified country. After a period of negotiation, he had consented to come to Israel voluntarily. Under the terms of the agreement, he would not face trial, since, under Israeli law, the only possible sentence was death. Instead he would remain under permanent administrative detention and would effectively “plead guilty” to his crimes against humanity by working with a team of historians at Yad Vashem and Hebrew University to produce a definitive history ofAktion 1005.
    There was little fanfare and none of the excitement that accompanied news of Eichmann’s kidnapping. Indeed, word of Radek’s capture was overshadowed within hours by a suicide bomber who murdered twenty-five people in a Jerusalem market. Lev derived a certain crude satisfaction from the development, for it seemed to prove his point that the State had more important things to worry about than chasing down old Nazis. He began referring to the affair as “Shamron’s folly,” though he quickly found himself out of step with the rank and file of his own service. Within King Saul Boulevard, Radek’s capture seemed to rekindle old fires. Lev adjusted his stance to meet the prevailing mood, but it was too late. Everyone knew that Radek’s apprehension had been engineered by theMemuneh and Gabriel, and that Lev had tried to block it at every turn. Lev’s standing among the foot soldiers fell to dangerously low levels.
    The half-hearted attempt to keep secret Radek’s Austrian identity was undone by the videotape of his arrival at Abu Kabir. The Vienna press quickly and correctly identified the prisoner as Ludwig Vogel, an Austrian businessman of some note. Did he truly agree to leave Vienna voluntarily? Or was he in fact kidnapped from his fortresslike home in the First District? In the days that followed, the newspapers were filled with speculative accounts of Vogel’s mystifying career and political connections. The press investigations strayed perilously close to Peter Metzler. Renate Hoffmann of the Coalition for a Better Austria called for an official inquiry into the affair and suggested that Radek may have been linked to the bombing of Wartime Claims and Inquiries and the mysterious death of an elderly Jew named Max Klein. Her demands fell largely on deaf ears. The bombing was the work of Islamic terrorists, the government said. And as for the unfortunate death of Max Klein, it was a suicide. Further investigation, said the minister of justice, was pointless.
    The next chapter in the Radek affair would take place not in Vienna but in Paris, where a mossy former KGB man popped up on French television to suggest Radek was Moscow’s man in Vienna. A former Stasi spymaster who’d become something of a literary sensation in the new Germany laid claim to Radek as well. Shamron first suspected the claims were part of a coordinated campaign of disinformation designed to inoculate the CIA from the Radek virus—which is exactly how he would have played it had he been in their shoes. Then he learned that inside the Agency, the suggestions that Radek may have been plying his trade on both sides of the street had caused something of a panic. Files were being hauled out of the deep