The Fallen Angel

her sisters. They were killed on October 19, 1994, when a suicide bomber from Hamas, Iran’s other proxy, detonated himself on a Number 5 bus in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street. Dina was seriously wounded in the attack and still walked with a slight limp.
    As usual, Mikhail Abramov arrived last. Lanky and fair with a fine-boned face and eyes the color of glacial ice, he had immigrated to Israel from Russia as a teenager and joined the Sayeret Matkal, the IDF’s elite special operations unit. Once described by Ari Shamron as “Gabriel without a conscience,” he had personally assassinated several of the top terror masterminds from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. He now carried out similar missions on behalf of the Office, though his enormous talents were not limited strictly to the gun.
    Within the corridors and conference rooms of King Saul Boulevard, the nine men and women gathered in Room 456C were known by the code name “Barak”—the Hebrew word for lightning—for their ability to gather and strike quickly. They had fought together, often under conditions of unbearable stress, on secret battlefields stretching from Moscow to the Caribbean to the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia. Gabriel had been lucky to survive their last operation, but now he stood before them once again, looking none the worse for wear, holding them spellbound with a story. It featured a museum curator whose father had been a tomb robber, a priest with a dangerous secret, and a glorified mobster named Carlo Marchese who was doing business with the world’s most dangerous terrorist group. The goal of the operation, said Gabriel, would be simple. They were going to assemble a dossier that would destroy Carlo and in the process blow a hole in Hezbollah’s bottom line. But it wouldn’t be sufficient simply to prove that Carlo Marchese was a criminal. They were going to find the cordata , the rope, linking him directly to Hezbollah. And then they were going to wrap it around his neck.
     
     
    They were a family of sorts, and like all families there were petty jealousies, unspoken resentments, and various other forms of sibling dysfunction. Even so, they managed to divide themselves into subunits and settle down to work with a minimum of bickering. Yossi, Chiara, and Mordecai saw to Carlo, while responsibility for Hezbollah’s criminal fund-raising networks fell to Dina, Rimona, Yaakov, and Mikhail. Gabriel and Eli Lavon floated somewhere in between, for it was their task to find the nexus between the two organizations—or, as Lavon put it, the wedding band that joined Carlo and Hezbollah in criminal matrimony.
    Before long, the walls of Room 456C reflected the unique nature of their undertaking. On one side were the outlines of Carlo Marchese’s overt business empire; on the other, the known elements of Hezbollah, Inc. It had but one task—to supply a steady stream of money to the most dangerous terrorist group the world had ever known. It was Hezbollah, not al-Qaeda, that first turned human beings into bombs, and Hezbollah that first developed a truly global capability. Indeed, on two occasions, it was able to reach its tentacles across the Atlantic and attack targets in Buenos Aires—first in 1992, when it bombed the Israeli Embassy, killing twenty-nine people, and again in 1994, when it destroyed the AMIA Jewish community center, leaving another ninety-five dead. Hezbollah’s ranks were filled with several thousand highly trained terrorists, many hidden within the worldwide Lebanese diaspora, and its vast arsenal of weaponry included several Scuds, making it the only terrorist group in the world to possess ballistic missiles. In short, Hezbollah had the ability to carry out a cataclysmic terrorist attack at the time and place of its choosing. All it required was the blessing of its Shiite clerical masters in Tehran.
    It was Allah who provided Hezbollah’s inspiration, but mere mortals saw to its financial needs. Their faces scowled from Dina’s side of the room. At the center of the web she placed the Lebanon Byzantine Bank. Then, with the help of Unit 8200, she assembled a communication matrix and phone tree that stretched from Beirut to London to the lawless Tri-Border Area of South America. Lebanon Byzantine Bank—or LBB in the lexicon of the team—was the glue that held it all together. Thanks to the cybersleuths from Unit 8200, the team perused its ledger sheets at will. Indeed, Yaakov joked that he knew more about